Brighton and Hove Council Ignores Black and Anti-racist Organisations and Votes To Adopt a Definition of Antisemitism that is both Racist and Antisemitic

October 18, 2018, 5:18 pm

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Brighton Council Leader Daniel Yates compared the IHRA to the Theft Act – He has a point! - Unlike the Greens Who Had No Point!

Brighton and Hove Council voted today to adopt the full IHRA Definition of ‘Anti-Semitism’ by 46 votes with 1 abstention.

Outside Hove Town Hall anti-racist organisations, trade unionists and Palestine Solidarity Campaign supporters demonstrated.  Present were banners from UNISON, and Brighton and Hove Trades Council.

Contrary to what we had expected there was no Zionist counter-demonstration. There was Simon Cobbs, who kept to himself, of Sussex Friends of Israel filming the demonstration and racist Lukey Stanger.  There was also a Zionist delegation, led by Fiona Sharpe of the far-Right Sussex Friends of Israel which was accompanied into Hove Town Hall by Daniel Yates, leader of the Labour Group and the Council. Grinning like a cat Yates avoided discussing with Black and Muslim demonstrators why he was supporting a racist definition of ‘anti-Semitism’.

The meeting started at 4.30 and I was down to ask a Question. My question was simplicity itself, which was just as well because I was facing 47 Brighton and Hove councillors, not the sharpest tools in the box.  Why, I asked, does the Council need to adopt a definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ that is over 500 words when there is a simple one, in the Oxford English Dictionary viz. ‘Hostility to or prejudice against Jews’.

Unsurprisingly Yates was unable to answer because that might have involved telling the truth, i.e. ‘we are adopting the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism because that is the best way to defend the world’s only apartheid state, Israel.’

Instead and quite amazingly Yates, who to be fair is not the most cerebral of people to have led the Labour Group, instead treated us to the fact that Theft is not all it seems and that there are many and varied definitions of theft, things like deception, fraud and extortion. All of which is true but all of which is irrelevant.  Theft is a criminal act (except when the rich commit it).  Anti-Semitism is a political act or crime whose definition is as simple as ABC.

When I responded, as I’m allowed to with a further question, I immediately made the point that the IHRA begins by stating it is a ‘non-legal definition’ so the comparison with the legalities of the Theft Act were absurd and irrelevant. 

Trades Council and Brighton & Hove Momentum banners

The main point that I tried to get across was that this was not about anti-Semitism but about Israel.  The IHRA was there to defend Israel not Jewish people. It did this by conflating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

I then explained, to the evident irritation of some Tory and Labour councillors, that I had lived in Brighton for over 40 years and I had never experienced anti-Semitism.  Neither have most Jews. It is all but non-existent.

Daniel Yates - Leader of the Labour Group - not the brightest tool in the box

I also explained, but I’m not sure that Yates and his New Labour friends understood, that far from defending Jewish people the IHRA actually left them more exposed because it defines anti-Semitism in terms of hatred not hostility. I gave the example of someone who says they don’t want their daughter to marry a Jew even though they have nothing personally against Jews.  That is hostility not hatred and is therefore not covered by the IHRA.

I also quoted what Nkosi Zwelivelile, the grandchild of Nelson Mandela wrotein The Guardian a week ago. It should be imprinted upon the brain of every Labour Councillor.

Like Madiba and Desmond Tutu before me, I see the eerie similarities between Israel’s racial laws and policies towards Palestinians, and the architecture of apartheid in South Africa. We South Africans know apartheid when we see it. In fact, many recognise that, in some respects, Israel’s regime of oppression is even worse.

The IHRA contains 11 examples, 7 of which refer to Israel. I quoted the preamble to the 11 illustrations which says that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.’ and made the point that Israel was not like any other country.  No normal western liberal democracy demolishes villages of one section of the populace in order to place another ethnic group in its place as Israel does to Palestinian villages such as Um al-Hiran and Khan al Ahmar.

Hove Town Hall - the venue for the Council meeting

My final flourish was to welcome the opposition of the Tory group to anti-Semitism and contrast it with when they opposed the right to immigrate to Britain for Jewish refugees from Czarist pogroms and anti-Semitism like my father’s family. I pointed out that they had introduced the first Immigration Act  the Aliens Act in 1905 to keep Jews out of Britain. I also noted that when Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany tried to enter this country the Tories opposed them as ‘bogus’ asylum seekers, just as they oppose asylum seekers today.

I also commented on the pathetic spectacle of the Green group and Phelim McCafferty lining up behind the two other major parties. Let no one think that the Greens represent any radical alternative to New Labour, be it in Brighton or nationally. During my speech a Council flunkey turned my mike off, not that it mattered as my voice carries anyway!  However I simply turned it back on!

Racists unite - Lukey Stanger of Red Road and Simon Cobbs of Sussex Friends of Israel, recently accused by fellow Zionists of blackmail

I was followed by Nadia Edmond, a member of the University College Union and a well known anti-racist who headed a delegation of Black, Muslim and anti-racist groups including Stand Up to Racism.  In the 5 minutes allotted to her she explained why the IHRA was an attack on free speech and how it added nothing to the fight against anti-Semitism or racism.  She quoted Oxford academic Brian Klug who said that when everything and everyone is anti-Semitic then no one is.

There was a reply by Fiona Sharpe of Sussex Friends of Israel, a far-Right group that pretends that it represents all of Brighton and Hove 3,000 Jews.  I hope it doesn’t because she is an out and out racist, who lied and perjured herself to Brighton magistrates court when a Palestinian member of Brighton PSC, Yasser, was charged with public order offences. After video of the events were produced the magistrates chose not to believe her.

Ms Sharpe’s main argument was that the Jewish community was entitled to ‘self define’ anti-Semitism and that it had chosen the IHRA.  This is wrong on many levels.  Firstly I doubt if 1% of the Jewish community have actually read it.  It is Zionist organisations who claim to speak on behalf of that community. Secondly anti-Semitism is not subjective but objective. The idea that any group can define their own oppression to the exclusion of any other interpretation is wrong intellectually and shows you can't actually defend that definition. In the case of anti-Semitism it is wrong on a number of levels.  Not all Jews are of the same opinion as to what constitutes anti-Semitism so what the Council was doing and New Labour was doing was adopting the viewpoint of the most racist and reactionary of Jews.

If anti-Semitism exists then it should be possible to define it with clear and explicit language and argument and not rely on a ‘right’ of those affected to define it as they wish.  It is a racist argument because it assumes all Jews are of one and the same mind.

But the most powerful reason is that no group has the right to define their own ‘oppression’ if it affects the rights of others.  The definition of anti-Semitism in the IHRA directly prevents Palestinians from defining Israel as a racist entity.  That alone makes the IHRA illegitimate.

The fact is that Jews in Britain are notoppressed. Anti-Semitism statistics are not reliable and given that the collation of them has been taken over by the Israeli state via organisations like the Community Security Trust no reliance should be placed on their figures, indeed there are very good reasons for not trusting them. [See The Myth of Increased Anti-Semitic Attacks & the Creation of a False Media Narrative]

The racism faced by Black, Asian, Muslim and Roma people is simply not the same, qualitatively or quantitatively as that faced by Jews.  Jews are a privileged and prosperous community. They suffer no economic disadvantage. They do not suffer state racism. There are no reports of Jewish deaths in custody or violence by the Police. There are no Jewish victims of Windrush or deportations. Anti-Semitism today is a marginal prejudice, nothing more.

That is why Jews, who are a minority, vote overwhelmingly for parties of the Right. When they or their representatives define anti-Semitism they do it along class lines and they see their enemies as those who are not privileged. That is why the ruling class and establishment in this country uses ‘anti-Semitism’ and Jews in order to effectively bolster and legitimise their own foreign policy support of Israel and the special relationship with Israel.

No one on the Council defended the IHRA in its own terms.  The main argument was the pathetic ‘right to define’ of the Jewish community as if their representatives or indeed the community itself was somehow neutral and above politics.

The most pathetic speech came from the Leader of the Greens, Phelim McCafferty, a wannabe member of the local establishment. Phelim, conscious of how he has ratted out on the cause of Palestine went to some lengths to argue that his support of the IHRA did not affect his support for the Palestinians. He accepted that the IHRA has already been used to close down debate.  In effect he was saying that he supported the Palestinians and he supported the main weapon, anti-Semitism, used against supporters of the Palestinians.  Totally incoherent and totally unprincipled.  Phelim and Brighton’s Greens have blown their credibility.

The first task of the next Labour Council after May should be to get rid of the IHRA as a threat to free speech and to get rid of Dan Yates as Leader of the Council.

Full credit should also be given to Penny Gilbey, the North Portslade Labour Councillor, who abstained and thereby ensured that the decision of the Council was not unanimous.  

Tony Greenstein
PS: when the Council video of the meeting becomes available I shall post excerpts

And if Daniel Yates and the leadership of the Council is serious about taking all forms of racism seriously they might now investigate the management of Knoll House in Hove where UNISON has been complaining there has been systematic racist bullying of staff - Black and East European. So far the Council has done nothing, an independent investigation having been blocked by the management's union, the GMB.

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Israel’s Education System Teaches Jewish children to Hate Palestinians

October 19, 2018, 5:31 pm

≫ Next: The Muddled and Confused Response of the Green Party to the IHRA is exemplified by Caroline Lucas’s Email to me

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What religious and nationalist indoctrination in schools means for Israel's future

It is a common myth assiduously propagated by Israel’s supporters that whereas Israel inculcates respect in its Education system for Arabs, the same is not true of the Palestinian education system.  A typical example is the article by neo-conservative Elliot Abrams for the Council on Foreign Relations entitled Teaching Palestinian Children to Value Terrorism. 

Abrams writes that ‘A new study of Palestinian textbooks finds that Palestinian children are being taught to glorify and value terrorism and violence.’ The assumption behind this is that Palestinian resistance to the Occupation, classified as ‘terrorism’ would not occur but for Palestinians being taught to hate their occupier. Indeed over time Palestinians would come to love the Occupation and the continual theft of their land, the attacks by settlers, the military checkpoints etc.  This is part of the process of normalising the Occupation (which is never called that) and demonising the victims.  It is on a par with the Nial Fergusson/Andrew Roberts view of British history.

There are a few mixed private schools in Israel run by the Max Rayne Foundation.  Hand in Hand Schools can be found in the Galilee, Beer Sheva and Jerusalem.  The Jerusalem school was  the victim of an arson attack in November 2014 by members of the fascist Lehava group, which has not been proscribed or declared a terrorist organisation.  Two brothers received 32 and 38 months.  Sprayed on the walls were slogans such as “There is no coexistence with cancer” and “Kahane was right”

But this doesn’t of course explain why Israel’s high school students are so racist and right-wing..  Nearly half of Israel's high school students do not believe that Israeli-Arabs are entitled to the same rights as Jews in Israel, according to the results of a survey in 2010.  Poll: Half of Israeli High Schoolers Oppose Equal Rights for Arabs11.3.10.

The same poll revealed that more than half the students would deny Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset.  At the same time 48 percent said that they would refuse orders to evacuate outposts and settlements in the Palestinian territories although nearly one-third - 31 percent - said they would refuse military service beyond the Green Line.

Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal, of Tel Aviv’s School of Education was quoted as saying that "Jewish youth have not internalized basic democratic values,"

There was nothing abnormal or erratic about this poll.  Almost exactly the same conclusions were reached in another poll taken six years later which found that nearly half of Jewish Israeli high school students believed that Arabs should not have the right to vote.

The poll, conducted by New Wave Research for the Israel Hayom daily, asked Jewish Israeli high school students in grades 11-12 a variety of questions intended to probe their opinions on current affairs and political identity. Half of Jewish high schoolers say Arabs shouldn’t vote – poll 13.4.16.

Nearly half (48%) of those polled answered “no” to the question: “Do you think Arab Israelis should be represented in the Knesset?”  52% said yes

military values are instilled in Israeli Jewish children from an early age

According to Reuven Harari, the CEO of pollster New Wave, most of the figures in the poll “were not surprising,” as they matched numbers pollsters have found for Israeli adults. Hariri told Army Radio that the research had two important and interconnected findings. First, youths in Israel are more right-wing than their parents. Second, while “the trend around the world is for youth to be more left-wing than their parents, in Israel we are special in that our youth is more to the right of their parents.”

60% of those polled also said they believed medical treatment should not be given to an injured terrorist and 82% said there was no chance at all of achieving a peace deal, while just 18% said an agreement was possible.  In addition 59% of high school students considered themselves right-wing and only 13% identified as left-wing.

But then it’s not altogether surprising. Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Knesset and Balad demanded an investigation into the training sponsored by the Israeli police and the education ministry, which he said “prepares students psychologically to kill Arabs.”

One photo shows a person – most of their body blurred with a black marker – using a paintball gun to fire at cutouts of men and women wearing checkered kuffiyeh headscarves that are associated with Palestinians. See Israeli police teach schoolchildren how to shoot Palestinians.

All this takes place within a segregated education system, one for Jews and another for Arabs.  Arab schools get a fraction, somewhere around a quarter per capita of the funds allocated for Jewish schools. 

Israel's warrior baby

Ha'aretz gave the example of two Jerusalem schools with nearly equal numbers of children, 782 pupils in the Beit Hinuch Jewish High School in western Jerusalem and 783 in the Ras al-Amud Arab boys’ high school in East Jerusalem. Both are municipal high schools, meaning that their budgets come from the municipality and the Education Ministry. The total budget allocated by the city for Beit Hinuch in 2016 is 16.3 million shekels ($4.3 million,) while the Arab school, with the same number of pupils, will be getting only 2.9 million shekels ($766,993).  In other word the Arab high school is receiving only 17%, one sixth, per pupil compared to the Jewish school. The number of teaching positions approved for Beit Hinuch is 70.8, while for Ras al-Amud it is only 21.7. 

There are those propagandists for Israel - the Joan Ryans, Margaret Hodges and Emily Thornberries - who still maintain that Israel is 'the only democracy in the Middle East'. Segregation and institutionalised discrimination is not, however, compatible with democracy. Except for a handful of mixed private schools Jews and Arab students go to separate schools. Arab Students in Jerusalem Get Less Than Half the Funding of Jewish Counterparts 

Israeli youth relive mock gunbattles

An important article Jewish and Arab pupils talk of unity, but Israel has never been so divided by Peter Beaumont in The Guardian (4.6.16) describes the introduction of a new civics textbook – To Be Citizens in Israel– produced by the Education Ministry, whose Minister is Naftali Bennett a member of the far-Right religious settlers party, Habayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home). Beaumont described how it had been accused of editing out Israeli Arabs and their experiences. He quoted an editorial in Ha’aretz Israel's New Civics Textbook Was Born in Sin and Must Be Opposed

“The book’s message is impossible to mistake: Jewish identity, as expressed in the state’s definition of itself and in the public sphere, takes priority over civic identity. This mainly reflects the views of an orthodox, conservative, rightwing strain of Judaism.

Beaumont wrote that ‘The furore over the book – which superseded one that rightwing parties such as Bennett’s complained was too critical of the state – has not been an isolated incident. In December, Bennett’s ministry removed a book, Dorit Rabinyan’s Borderlife, that depicted a love story between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, from the curriculum of Israeli secular state schools.

Not one Arab participated in the writing of the civics book.

“The text contains no model of shared life between Jews and Arabs. The Jews’ rights are clear; the Arabs’ place is restricted; and the walls separating them are only raised even higher. The racism that is ripping Israeli society apart receives almost no mention.”

But of course it suits the media here and in the United States to portray Israel’s education system as fostering mutual tolerance unlike the Palestinian education sector which is seen as responsible for ‘terrorism.’

Tony Greenstein

How fascism Is Creeping Into Israel's Education System

Shaul Arieli

Jun 20, 2018 7:40 PM

An Israeli classroom (illustrative). Tomer Appelbaum

If we look at Israel’s education system through the prism of PISA – the Program of International Student Assessment – the situation looks bleak. Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development conducts these exams to check the skills of 15-year-old students the world over in reading, mathematics and science. Consistently, the results for Israel suggest that the percentage of high-school graduates who will find it difficult to integrate into their society and economy is one of the highest among the more than 70 countries in which the PISA surveys are conducted. The achievements of Israel’s teachers, which the test also evaluates, also leave much to be desired.

The situation is even worse, considering that between 2006 and 2016, the local education budget actually grew by 30 billion shekels (about $7 billion) and has continued to increase apace since. But the investment of all those billions resulted in improvements of only another 13 points in the PISA science tests and another 28 points in math section.

The explanation for this is neither new nor surprising. “We need to understand that we are educating students for their future, and not for our past,” says Andreas Schleicher, coordinator of the PISA and in essence the OECD’s “minister of education,” in regard to the low achievements in Israel. As he told Haaretz (Hebrew edition) last month, “Pedagogy in Israel is very traditional and standard. It is not directed toward developing the student’s skills, it does not emphasize creative thinking and problem solving. There is too much rote learning It doesn’t work like that anymore. In the modern world you are not rewarded for what you know, but for what you can do with the knowledge you have accumulated.”

There is nothing new about all this. In 2005, I published an article in the wake of an announcement by a senior Education Ministry official, in which I wrote: “We have been informed that henceforth part of the matriculation grade in Bible will include memorization of verses and reciting them aloud. The goal underlying this decision by the coordinating supervisor of Bible studies is ‘to draw the students close to the Bible and to improve their ability to read texts aloud.’

“How lovely that in the age of information and technology, innovation in the Education Ministry takes the form of placing the emphasis not on the ability to understand a text, nor on critical thinking or even on the sheer ability to find one’s way through the recesses of the Bible, but on the ability of Israeli students to present an appropriate Zionist response to church choirs by chanting a number of selected verses according to biblical cantillation.”

And, continuing: “Judaism’s cultural richness was born from criticism and wonder, from disputes and from daring, and not from memorization and reading aloud It’s essential to create intellectual curiosity.”

We should not be surprised by the politicization of the education system. In September 2016, Education Minister Naftali Bennett chose to declare, at an event saluting the TALI (Hebrew acronym for “enriched Jewish studies”) education fund, that,

“The study of Judaism and excelling in it is more important to me than the study of mathematics and science.” Not for the first time, Bennett also rejected criticism that was leveled at this approach. One such critique was voiced at the time by Rachel Elior, professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “What is most important are studies about human dignity, according to which the sanctity of life is universal and is not conditional on religion and nationality.”

It’s worth recalling that the education clause in the platform of Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi party ignores societal diversity and advocates foisting a religious-Zionist (nationalist) education on all Jewish children. The love of homeland that the party seeks to teach involves annexation of the West Bank, continued rule over another people and the international isolation of Israel until “we accustom the world”to this policy. Its educational model ignores such biblical imperatives as “you shall love the stranger.” It evokes the educational approach about which Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote a searing warning: 

“A person who accepts the opinion that ‘the state,’ ‘the nation,’ ‘the homeland,’ ‘security’ and so forth are the supreme values, and that unconditional loyalty to those values is an absolute and sacred duty, will be capable of perpetrating every abomination for the sake of that sacred interest, without any pangs of conscience.”

Bennett’s approach is reflected in the allocation of resources to nationalist-religious-messianic education, in which, it must be said, the two previous education ministers, Gideon Sa’ar and Shai Piron, were also complicit. According to Education Ministry data, between 2012 and 2016, the ministry increased the per capita budget for students in state-religious high schools by the highest percentage of all the educational streams: Totalling 33,000 shekels (about $9,500) per student per year, the sum allotted was 22 percent higher than that for students in the secular state education system, and 67 percent higher than for students in Arab high schools.

Bennett knows that by shaping the political outlook of the country’s youth it will be possible to influence the political system, and with it Israel’s character and regime, in the years ahead. This insight is shared by all of those who wish to “settle in the hearts,”and promote nationalist and messianic ideas among the larger public.

But the educational disaster currently being experienced by Israeli society runs deeper: It is tainted by signs of fascism. “Anti-intellectualism” has always been a symptom of fascism. The persecution of liberal intellectuals for their supposed betrayal of tradition or of authoritarian ideology was an obligation for the thinkers of the elite in such places as fascist Italy. Discussing this, the poet and author Lea Goldberg noted that intellectuals and creative artists pose a threat to dictatorships and to worldviews that deny human liberty, when they (the artists) teach “humanity to say ‘no’ with bitter derision when the time demands it.”

This, too, was how many perceived the “code of ethics” for university lecturers drawn up last year by philosopher Asa Kasher at Bennett’s request. And MK Tzipi Hotovely, later to become Israel’s deputy foreign minister, wrote on her Facebook page in September 2014 in reference to the creative backbone of Israel’s high-tech industry, the engine of the growth of the country’s economy:

“The refusal of officers in [IDF intelligence unit] 8200 [to serve in the reserves] is a social explosive belt and reflects the moral bankruptcy of the education system in which they grew up. They are not worthy to serve in the world’s most moral army. The chief of staff must start the process of their dismissal immediately.”

Israel’s failure in the PISA literacy tests also attests to the “degeneration of language” that we see in many elected officials. Still, no one even comes close to the minister of culture in this regard. All fascistic textbooks used throughout history have made use of a minimal lexicon and the most basic grammar, with the aim of depleting the tools for critical and complex thinking. In a five-minute speech that then-Likud MK Miri Regev delivered to high-school students while appearing on a panel of politicians in 2012, she asserted that Labor MK Shelly Yacimovich voted for Hadash (the communist, Jewish-Arab party), and activist Stav Shafir (who later became an MK from Labor) was a communist.

In such a culture, we may find it difficult to follow and understand a process that unfolds across many years – until the moment when a particular slice of reality reflects the full force and implications of such a process. This is not the first time the naked truth about Israel’s teachers has been exposed. It happened two years ago, too, in the episode of the survey of teachers regarding the history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Suddenly we were confronted with the gloomy picture: A survey conducted in September 2015 by the newspaper Israel Hayom found that 69 percent of the country’s school teachers do not know what happened on November 29, 1947, and 57 percent do not know what the Green Line is or how it was determined. The material that must be memorized is chosen carefully – the prayer for rain, for example, because according to the Education Ministry this can influence rainfall – but it does not include formative events in the history of Zionism.

There’s nothing accidental about this ignorance concerning issues that determine our fate. It is the result of the fact that in recent years the Education Ministry has been led by figures from the nationalist and messianic-religious camp.

The process that is occurring in the state education system has become exacerbated mainly due to two important trends, which are instrumental in creating the political culture and the greater social culture that exists in the public domain.

The first, and more important, trend guarantees – in the absence of knowledge of Israel’s major milestones – that the school curriculum will not include certain concepts and facts, and outlines of historical processes, that could serve as the basis for a fuller understanding of the history of Zionism and the conflict with the Arabs. It is easier to introduce “historical truths” into this knowledge vacuum and to change them according to various political needs – as seen, for example, in the prime minister’s remarks about the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s supposed responsibility for proposing the Final Solution to Hitler.

The second trend involves the introduction of nationalist, religious and messianic content into the curriculum, which Bennett manages to do clandestinely; it’s easy and convenient when there is no other solid base of knowledge to be contended with. This is a manifestation of the education minister’s main mission, based on his statement that for the sake of the Land of Israel it is necessary to change the people of Israel and the State of Israel. He and his colleagues are now focusing on “settling in people’s hearts,” following a series of traumas deriving from the shattering of messianism on the rocks of reality: the Gaza withdrawal, the evacuation of the illegal Migron and Amona outposts, and the containment of the building momentum in the settlements as a result of international pressure.

This evil wind that is blowing through the country’s education system is in total contradiction to the spirit of the country’s founders. They sought to ensure the future more than to preserve the past – as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second president, wrote in their 1918 book, “Eretz Yisrael”: “If we wish to determine the borders of the Land of Israel of today, [it is] mainly if we see it not as the preserve of the Jewish past but as the land of the Jewish future.”

Indeed, if these trends are not halted and the process not reversed, Israel will end up realizing the warning of Lord Nathaniel Rothschild, who wrote to Theodor Herzl in August 1902,

“I tell you very frankly that I should view with horror the establishment of a Jewish colony pure and simple. it would be a Ghetto with the prejudices of a Ghetto; it would be a small petty Jewish state, orthodox and illiberal, excluding the Gentile and the Christian.”

The Muddled and Confused Response of the Green Party to the IHRA is exemplified by Caroline Lucas’s Email to me

October 20, 2018, 7:24 pm

≫ Next: Ryanair Tells Victim of Racist Abuse to Move Seats and then Comforts the Racist – BOYCOTT RYANAIR

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Why Does a Party That Professes Support for the Palestinians End Up Supporting the Zionists?

Being a Marxist, the question I always ask is why?  Why does someone, like Caroline Lucas, who is a perfectly decent human being who no doubt cares deeply and passionately about things like fracking and who professes support for the Palestinians, nonetheless continually fall on the wrong side of the fence?

Even the Leader of the Greens on Brighton & Hove Council, Phelim McCafferty, probably fooled himself into thinking that he is supporting the Palestinians whilst voting alongside Conservative and Unionist councillors as well as New Labour.  I suspect that the 10 Green councillors who followed him like sheep also believe that they can both support the Palestinians and a definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ which undermines that support. In short they end up supporting both the oppressed and oppressors.

What is happening now in terms of Caroline Lucas and the Green councillors is not unique.  I can remember back in 2005, when I stood for the Alliance for Green Socialism in Brighton Pavilion, the Green Party candidate was Keith Taylor, also a perfectly decent person, who is now an MEP for the South-East.  We did a hustings together and my main argument and difference with him was that the Green Party had no anti-capitalist or class politics. 

Volker Beck - the German Green MP, Zionist and a racist

I gave as an example the fact that Die Grunen had steadily moved to the Right in Germany where they had formed a coalition with the SPD.  The Green Foreign Minister, Joshka Fischer, had presided over the introduction of German troops into Afghanistan, the first time German troops had fought abroad since the 2^nd World War. The anti-war party had become the part of western imperialism and today the Green Party under Volker Beck is to the right of the CDU on Israel/Palestine.

How, I asked Keith, had it come to this? That a Green Party, when it gets into government, does something that no Christian Democrat government had ever considered? It is fair to say that Keith Taylor was stumped. Or why when there was Green participation in a government in Ireland they had gone along with the most vicious austerity politics before being booted out of office?

The answer seems obvious.  For all its radical fringe politics the Green Party sees itself as an Establishment Party. It believes that a capitalism of small producers can deliver the goods.  In essence it believes in a capitalism without exploitation which is a complete contradiction since capitalism is based on profit above need.

Caroline  Lucas and Phelim McCafferty on NHS Demonstration

Being in favour of environmentally friendly policies and all good things and true doesn’t really equip you to deal with conflicts like Palestine.  It doesn’t help you either when you gain control of a council like Brighton and Hove and then you come up against the workforce and the trade unions.  You begin to act like any other Conservative or even Labour Council which is exactly what happened between 2011 and 2015.

Both Caroline Lucas and a very sheepish Phelim McCafferty, who realises just how much he has pissed off people in Brighton and Hove  Palestine solidarity group argue that you can support the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and support the Palestinians by resorting to casuistry and logic chopping. So Caroline believes that this abysmal definition, which as Stephen Sedley rightly said is not even a definition, it’s a Zionist rant about all the things they consider ‘anti-Semitic’, can be remedied if you add the Home Affairs Select Committee Report caveat.

The two caveats that the Committee added were that:

ØIt is not antisemitic to criticise the Government of Israel, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent.

ØIt is not antisemitic to hold the Israeli Government to the same standards as other liberal democracies, or to take a particular interest in the Israeli Government’s policies or actions, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent.

Yet this Report was flawed from the start.  With Chuka Ummuna and his friends on the Committee using it as a means to attack Jeremy Corbyn. The Committee Report as a whole was severely flawed (for example attacking people like the then Black NUS President Malia Bouattia without even giving her the chance to respond or calling her to give evidence). The reliance on these two caveats demonstrates the weakness of Caroline’s argument.

The mere fact that criticism of Israel is seen as anti-Semitic in the first place, with or without ‘anti-Semitic intent’ begs the question ‘what is anti-Semitic intent’. It is a catch 22 situation and demonstrates how flawed the IHRA is.

I understand that Phelim McCafferty went to the Labour group leader Daniel Yates to suggest the insertion of the caveats into the motion and he was refused. Having been turned down he just went back and accepted it.

I suggest that Caroline Lucas reads the excellent articleby David Plank and Rosemary Bechler in Open Democracy which takes apart the Home Affairs Select Committee Report on Anti-Semitism.  Plank was a former government special adviser on social security and thus a former civil servant of some standing. He issued a devastating critique of this Report branding it a hatchet job that was politically motivated by antagonism to Jeremy Corbyn. See Chilling effects: the politics of anti-semitism in the UK

My article Anti-Semitism in the UK looks at the Home Affairs Select Committee Report in the light of Plank’s critique and finally Plank’s “Antisemitism in the United Kingdom” House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, HC 136 A Critique

The first of Plank’s Conclusion & recommendations sets the tone:

A.          I came to this report as a former specialist adviser to the then House of Commons Social Services Committee (Chair, Renee Short MP). It saddens me to find a report which so signally fails to live up to the standards set by select committees over the years. Most regrettably, my conclusion is that this Report is a partisan party political polemic which should not have been agreed and made public by a House of Commons select committee. It fails to meet the basic standards required of select committees as to their inquiries and reports. This is particularly distressing on so important and contentious a matter as antisemitism in our country.

Dina Porat, Zionist historian of the Holocaust and inspiration behind the IHRA - her job is to mould holocaust history in with the Zionist narrative

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to either Caroline or Phelim that there is a context to the IHRA definition.  It hasn’t sprung out of nowhere.  It is a product of a massive propaganda push by the Israeli government to brand their opponents as anti-Semitic. It was written at the suggestion of the Israeli state’s chief Holocaust historian Dina Porat, who was based at the Kantor Centre, Tel Aviv University.

Porat is the person who signed off on Netanyahu’s recent agreement with the Polish Government in respect of its recent Holocaust law. In March a law came into operation which made it a criminal offence to suggest that Poles had been complicit in the Holocaust or Nazi crimes. This despite the fact that in 2001, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski had offered a national apology for the murder of up to 1,600 Jews who were herded into a barn, which was then set alight, by fellow Poles. Similar pogroms occurred in other areas of Eastern Poland.

Netanyahu did a deal with the Polish regime which removed the criminal penalties whilst retaining the offence itself thus allowing fines to be exacted. The reason why Netanyahu agreed this sordid deal was that Poland is one of Israel’s closest allies in Europe. It is a far-Right government which contains a number of anti-Semites in it. The Law and Justice Party, which forms the government, opposed the apology for Jedwabne. The leader of the party in the European Parliament, Michal Kaminski, going as far as to suggestit was Poland’s Jews who should have been apologising to Poles!

Picket of Yad Vashem in July 2018 against the visit of the anti-semitic and racist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a close ally of Netanyahu - holocaust survivors played an important part in the picket

Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and former chief historian at Yad Vashem, its Holocaust propaganda museum, denouncedthe agreement.

‘It’s a betrayal of the memory of the Holocaust and the interest of the Jewish people. And the reason for it is entirely pragmatic: the diplomatic, political, and economic ties between the Israeli government and the government of Poland.’

Yad Vashem, despite its role as a propaganda institute which uses the Holocaust as an ideological weapon, was equally forthright. It denouncedthe joint statement between the Polish government and Netanyahu as containing ‘highly problematic wording that contradicts existing and accepted historical knowledge in this field,”

Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard defended Poland's antisemitic Michal Kaminski who opposed a national apology for Jedwabne

Dina Porat, who is the chief historian to Yad Vashem declaredthat ‘we can live with” the statement which effectively exonerated Poland of any complicity in the Holocaust.  The reason I mention this is that Porat, who is quite content to alter the historical record when it comes to the Holocaust, if Israel’s political needs so dictate, was also the person who pushed hardest for the IHRA. Kenneth Stern, the person who actually drafted the IHRA recalled that;

the idea for a common definition was, as far as I know, first articulated by Dina Porat, who leads the Stephen Roth Institute, .... in April 2004. I recall Dina, who gets very animated when she latches on to a good idea, talking to me, to my colleague Andy Baker, and just about anyone else she could corner about the need for a definition.  The Working Definition of Antisemitism – A Reappraisal

Given its antecedents the IHRA should have been rejected on that account alone.  The idea of amending a document with a background in Israeli propaganda organisations is absurd.  Would you compile a definition of Islamaphobia on the basis of what British nationalist organisations come up with? Israel is an apartheid state.  It displaces and demolishes Palestinian homes to replace them with Jewish settlers.  What it does is far worse than anything Tommy Robinson will ever do yet I assume that McCafferty and Lucas haven’t yet signed up to the programme of this tawdry British fascist. So what is the attraction of this Israeli state redefinition of anti-Semitism? 

What has also thrown the Greens into a state of panic and confusion is that organisations claiming to represent British Jews have been at the forefront of the campaign to support the IHRA. Because they have no class analysis of racism they are bewildered. As one of those signed up to the Equalities Agenda, as it’s called, the Greens have no ability to differentiate between those who are oppressed – Blacks and Muslims in Britain and the Palestinians and Jews. Jews,although they are a minority in Britain are a White minority. They are not oppressed.

To these liberals, and really the Green Party is a liberal party at heart with a green tinge, there is no understanding that racism is not about personal interactions but the actions of the state. Racism is about power. They have no understanding of how class and race politics interact. Which means in practice that they are stuck in identity politics and every identity, oppressed or oppressor is equal.

The IHRA is flawed from start to finish.  It really has nothing at all to do with anti-Semitism which is why Caroline Lucas’s defence of her stance on the IHRA is so shocking.

Tony Greenstein

Email exchange Tuesday 16^th October

Dear Tony,

Thank you for your email and for sharing a copy of the open letter published on your blog. My apologies for not writing back sooner.

You make lots of arguments but for me this essentially comes down to one key point, namely that I disagree with you as to whether the IHRA definition prevents criticism of the Israeli government and its actions by automatically labelling it antisemitism. I don’t agree that the definition means criticism of Israel is automatically antisemitic. Rather, it makes clear that there has to be some kind of manifestation of hatred towards Jews for that to be the case.  I recognise the definition is being used to try to shut down criticism and debate in some contexts, but I think that’s a misuse of the definition and will continue to say as much. I therefore advocate its adoption – with the very helpful clarifying amendments from the cross party Home Affairs Select Committee on this specific point. I have no intention of ceasing my work speaking out about the illegal occupation of Palestine, Israel’s human rights abuses, the blockade of Gaza and so forth.

Best wishes, Caroline

Dear Caroline,

Thank you for getting back to me about the IHRAmisdefinition of anti-Semitism. Your position though is entirely illogical.

I don’t doubt that you support the Palestinians but unfortunately you support a definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ whose sole purpose it is to equate that support with hatred against Jews.

The IHRA definition conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. By ‘anti-Zionism’ I mean a critique of Israel that goes beyond criticism of particular policies to what is termed the Jewish State itself. In other words whydoes Israel behave as it does.  Is it simply an aberration? Is it because Netanyahu is in power but if the Israeli Labour Party was in government such things wouldn’t happen?

Anti-Zionism  is where you are drawing the line. I accept that you don’t hesitate to criticise particular policies but you don’t draw the conclusion that there must be something fundamentally wrong about the Israeli state compared to all other states.

It is as if 42 years ago you had criticised the South Africa government for its policies of shooting the inhabitants of Soweto but drawn the line at criticising Apartheid.

You accept that the definition is being used to shut down criticism of Israel but then you say that this is a misuse of it.  I disagree. Such ‘misuse’ is inherent in the definition itself. When Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge says, that:

Endeavours to conflate the two (anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism) by characterising everything other than anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic are not new. What is new is the adoption... of a definition of anti-Semitism which endorses the conflation.

Is he wrong?  Why? Hugh Tomlinson QC statedthat

‘there is likely to be lack of consistency in its application and a potential chilling effect on public bodies which, in the absence of definitional clarity, may seek to sanction or prohibit any conduct which has been labelled by third parties as antisemitic without applying any clear criterion of assessment.

Is that also wrong? Geoffrey Robertson QC arguedthat

the looseness of the definition is liable to chill legitimate criticisms of the state of Israel and coverage of human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Perhaps he too is wrong? All three of the above are arguing that what Professor David Feldman wrote, that the definition is ‘bewilderingly imprecise’, is deliberate. It is precisely because of its lack of any precision that the IHRA is so dangerous.

Stephen Sedley goes further and statesthat the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’

Even the author of the definition, Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee, in testimony to Congress described the targeting of a Professor Rebecca Gould at Bristol University, for writing an academic article on how the Israeli state uses the Holocaust to sanctify itself, as ‘chilling and McCarthy like.’

I don’t incidentally argue that the definition ‘automatically’ labels criticism of the Israeli state as anti-Semitic. It is far cleverer than that.  As others have pointed out, it is the definition’s deliberate vagueness that makes it such a useful weapon in the hands of the opponents of free speech.

However I disagree with you that ‘there has to be some manifestation of hatred’ for something to be anti-Semitic. That would be logical but the definition is anything but logical. This is very clear from the way the definition is being used and the way the illustrations are being decoupled from the 38 word definition. In addition, the very definitions themselves lend themselves to such a decoupling. This is particularly true of 3 of the examples:

i.             ‘Applying double standards’ to Israel that are not applied to other countries.  That clearly has nothing to do with hate. It concerns political criticism of Israel.

ii.            ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’ This too relates to political critique not hatred. There are clearly similarities in pre-Holocaust Nazi Germany and Israel e.g. the marriage laws, the quest for racial purity as manifested in the denial of nationality for Arab citizens.

iii.           ‘claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor’also has nothing to do with hate but is a political critique.

I am leaving to one side the incoherence of a definition which says that Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel are anti-Semitic. If Israel is the fulfilment of Jewish self-determination, i.e. the Jews are a nation, then it is obviously correct to hold them responsible for Israel’s actions. Likewise if Israel is the Jewish national state then why shouldn’t someone accuse Jews of being more loyal to Israel? Is it racist to accuse British people of being more loyal to Britain than France?

The question that puzzles me is why the hell would you want to use a definition of anti-Semitism that is so politically incoherent and which lends itself to the suppression of free speech? What is it about the definition that, despite all these flaws, makes it so attractive?

The only conclusion I can reach is that you are unwilling to go against the Establishment consensus. That you value your position as a member of the British Establishment, albeit its radical green fringe. I am referring to a consensus forged by the State Department in Washington which first adopted the IHRA definition (in its previous EUMC guise). The IHRA is a definition of anti-Semitism which chimes with America’s foreign policy interest in supporting Israel, right or wrong. 

Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that ‘man cannot serve two masters’. I would say that you cannot both support the Palestinians and a definition of anti-Semitism that renders such support anti-Semitic.

I would ask you to rethink your support of the IHRA, a definition of anti-Semitism which, as you admit, has been used to shut down criticism. Not only do you not need a definition of anti-Semitism to oppose it but if you really want a definition, then the Oxford English dictionary’s ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ is far more useful than a 500+ word one.

Best wishes

Tony

Open Letter to Caroline Lucas MP 6^th October 2018

Dear Caroline,

During last year’s General Election you wrote to me explaining that:

‘it’s vital that we do more to tackle antisemitism and this was my motivation in backing the IHRA definition.’ 

You went on to explain ‘the importance of not conflating criticism of Israel with genuine anti-Jewish racism’ and in the same breath spoke about ‘drawing where helpful on the IHRA definition, at the same time as protecting freedom of speech and promoting Green Party policy on Israel and Palestine.’

This is probably as good an example of cognitive dissonance as it gets. You went on to ask me ‘If you are aware of any more helpful definitions, particularly when it comes to illustrative examples, I’d be interested to see them’ whilst explaining that you wished to withdraw your support from an Early Day Motion supporting the IHRA but ‘At the moment I am not able to remove my name but shall enquire whether that’s possible if I am re-elected to Parliament on June 8.’

You concluded by assuring me that:

 ‘I reject any idea that support for Palestine equates with antisemitism and share your concern about any attempts to prevent activities or silence voices designed to highlight the ongoing occupation of Palestine and the Israeli authorities' complicity in human rights and other abuses

Despite your obvious confusion I was pleased that you were willing to withdraw your support for the IHRA. One should always welcome the sinner who sees the light and repenteth on the road to Damascus. Unfortunately it appears that you have reverted to your sinful past.

I was tempted to ask you why it was necessary “to do more to tackle anti-Semitism” when it barely exists in this country. I’m not aware of any Jewish Windrush-style deportations or Jewish deaths in custody or the Stop and Search of Jews in Golders Green or indeed violence against Jews as Jews. Jews are living in a golden age. The assumption that anti-Semitism is increasing is one of those taken for granted establishment myths that become true by virtue of repetition.

I understand that the Green Party is due to debate the IHRA at its conference this weekend and you are backing an Executive motion supporting the IHRA. On 13^th August you issued a statement expressing your support for the IHRA at the same time as reiterating your support for the Palestinians.  This is like someone who murders his parents whilst professing his love for them.

The whole purpose of the IHRA is to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. I doubt if there is a single Palestine solidarity activist in the country who hasn’t been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. Likewise there isn’t a single Jewish supporter of the Palestinians who hasn’t been called a ‘traitor’ ‘self-hater’ or ‘kapos’.

Your decision to support and whitewash the IHRA, in all its McCarthyist glory, is shameful. It suggests that yours and the Green Party’s commitment to civil liberties and human rights is skin deep. The IHRA has nothing whatsoever to do with combating anti-Semitism. That is why the anti-Semitic regimes of Hungary and Poland, both of which are part of the 31 country International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, endorse the definition.

There is nothing in the IHRA that anti-Semites such as Tommy Robinson (an ardent Zionist) can’t sign up to.

In your statement you say that you support the IHRA because ‘on balance... the definition provides an instructive framework that can help with the vital work of education, understanding and campaigning’

I don’t know what an ‘instructive framework’ is and I suspect neither do you. Perhaps Professor David Feldman, Director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism is wrong when he says that the core definition, “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.”  is‘bewilderingly imprecise.’ Perhaps you know something he doesn’t?

Sir Stephen Sedley, the former Court of Appeal Judge, who is himself Jewish, in his article Defining Anti-Semitism, whilstcommenting on the Opinion of Hugh Tomlinson QC that the IHRA was ‘unclear and confusing’ suggested that it was ‘calculatedly misleading’.

Renowned human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson QC described the IHRA as ‘not fit for purpose.’ One wonders what it is about the IHRA definition that you have discovered that eminent human rights lawyers, academics and the most radical judge to sit inthe Court of Appeal has missed out on?

Both Robertson and Sedley pointed out a curious thing about the IHRA that you in your enthusiasm seem to have missed. Far from educating people as to what anti-Semitism is, the IHRA actually makes it more difficult because it raises the bar, defining anti-Semitism as ‘hatred’ rather than ‘hostility’.

You asked me about any other helpful definitions of anti-Semitism. Could I suggest the Oxford English Dictionary definition? ‘Anti-Semitism is hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’ Or perhaps Oxford academic Brian Klug’s definition, in his Kristallnacht memorial lecture at the Berlin Jewish Museum in 2014:

antisemitism is a form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are

The OED defines anti-Semitism in terms of ‘hostility’ whereas the IHRA defines it in terms of ‘hatred’. The two are not the same. If someone says ‘I don’t want my daughter to marry a Jew although I’ve got nothing against them’ then according to the IHRA they are not anti-Semitic. You go on to say that

‘The legitimate concerns about free speech can be powerfully addressed by our continuing as a Party to champion... the rights of the Palestinian people to peace, freedom and justice.... The definition... explicitly allow for this and make clear that criticising Israel or its policies, for example, is only antisemitic if it’s deliberately manifesting or inciting hatred

.’

You are wrong on all counts. It’s like saying you can oppose poverty whilst supporting austerity  If you conflate support for the Palestinians with anti-Semitism, and 7 of the 11 IHRA examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ include the Israeli state, then you cannot help but undermine support for the Palestinians.

It is simply untrue to say that the definition only forbids criticism of Israel that manifests or incites hatred. Have you read it? The IHRA says that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.’ In other word criticism of Israel that is unlike that of other countries isanti-Semitic.

Granted the IHRA allows you to criticise specific actions of the Israeli state, but if you criticise the state itself, as a Zionist and Jewish supremacist state, then that is anti-Semitic. It’s like being told that it was fine to criticise the actions of the Apartheid state of South Africa but you couldn’t criticise the state itself.

As Sedley put it ‘characterising everything other than anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic (is) not new.’ Israel is unlikeany other state in the world but according to the IHRA if you say this then you are anti-Semitic. Perhaps you can tell me which other state in the world, apart from Burma, demolishes the homes and villages of one section of the populace in order to replace them with settlers from the dominant racial group?

In most states citizenship is the legal embodiment of nationality however Israel is the state of the Jewish nation, wherever they reside, which means it excludes 20% of its citizens from the national collective. That is why there is no Israeli nationality. Perhaps you know of another state where this is so?

One of the IHRA’s 11 examples of anti-Semitism states that ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.’. I fail to understand why opposing the right of the ‘Jewish people’, itself a contentious formulation, is an example of hatred and therefore anti-Semitic. Is it racist to oppose Scottish or Welsh self-determination? And what is the connection between saying Israel is a racist state and anti-Semitism? Indeed what is the connection between the first and second halves of this sentence? You can support Jewish self-determination and still believe Israel is a racist state. I find it difficult to believe that you find this non-sequitur educative!

You say that you will ‘continue to use my voice to speak out against the abuses of the Israeli authorities, to demand that the human rights of both Palestinians and Israelis are upheld’. I presume when you refer to Israelis you mean Israeli Jews! Palestinian oppression is a political not a human rights problem. Just as Apartheid in South Africa was at its core a political question.

Most states in the world are racist but very few have racism at the very core of their identity. Racism is the DNA of the Israeli state.  It is a Jewish Supremacist State as the recently passed Jewish Nation State Law confirmed.

To give but one example. At the moment Israel’s 5 yearly local elections are being held. In Tel Aviv Likud, the party of government are campaigning on the slogan ‘It’s either us or them’. The them are the Arab minority of Jaffa and the African refugees of South Tel Aviv. It is a campaign to racially purify Tel Aviv and Jaffa, to make it a ‘Hebrew city’. In what other state in the world would a governing party be campaigning to ‘cleanse’ a city of its minority populations? Yet to point this out is ‘anti-Semitic’ according to the IHRA definition that you have embraced.

You suggest that although ‘The IHRA definition isn’t perfect (but) it’s a working definition.’I hate to tell you this but it has been a working definition for 13 years!

You also state that ‘letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is distracting from the actions all political parties need to take to show real leadership on antisemitism.’  This is fatuous. Completely puerile. Words devoid of all meaning. There is nothing good about a definition of anti-Semitism that anti-Semites can sign up to but which defines anti-racists and anti-imperialists as anti-Semites.

What amazes me is that you are endorsing the weaponisation of anti-Semitism, and a definition whose primary purpose is the suppression and chilling of free speech. Even Kenneth Stern, the author of the IHRA, has come to recognise that this is what the IHRA has become.

As Stern acknowledged in testimony to Congress, ‘The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus... at a conference in 2010 about the impact of the definition, I highlighted this misuse, and the damage it could do.’

Whereas the author of the IHRA has become alarmed at how it is being used you seem either oblivious or indifferent. Among the many examples of how the IHRA has been used is the case of Professor Rebecca Gould of Bristol University. On the basis of an article she had written in 2011, Sir Eric Pickles, the anti-Semitic former Chair of Conservative Friends of Israel called on Gould to ‘consider her position’. Kenneth Stern described this as ‘chilling and McCarthy-like’ yet you turn a blind eye to this and simply pretend that the IHRA is about combating anti-Semitism. The group who targeted Professor Gould, demanding that she be sacked for having compared Israel with Nazi Germany, was the far-Right Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. The CAA complained that ‘the lecturer is able to continue to teach unimpeded.’

It is therefore baffling that the Green Party, in response to a CAA attack on Shahrar Ali, a candidate for the Green Party leadership, stated that “We have reached out to the Campaign Against Antisemitism to ensure we fully understand their concerns and to respond accordingly.” Apart from waging a continuous war against Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite, the CAA is almost certainly funded by the Israeli state as part of its campaign against BDS.  What you were really doing was reaching out to Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli state. Perhaps next time the GP thinks of reaching out to this racist group, which routinely classifies all Palestine solidarity as ‘Jew hate’ they will first read my criticisms of them in Electronic Intifada. Below is a delightfully racist caricature of a Muslim that appears on their website. If someone drew a similar caricature of a Jew then all hell would break loose.

The obvious question that you and the Green Party have failed to ask is why is there a need for a definition of anti-Semitism at all? You don’t need a definition of fascism to oppose fascists and you don’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to oppose anti-Semitism. If you want one you can adopt the legal test of the reasonable person on the Clapham Omnibus. If asked what anti-Semitism is they would most likely say ‘a person who doesn’t like Jews.’ You don’t need a 500+ word definition unless your purpose is to conflate criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism.

Your attitude to the IHRA, that it is compatible with freedom of speech is like saying that the right of women to choose to have an abortion is compatible with legislation outlawing abortion.

I am left asking what is the real reason for you changing your position on the IHRA? The only answer seems to be that the British Political Establishment has reached a consensus in support ofthe IHRA, as a means of defending British foreign policy and the special relationship with the United Statesand you are unwilling to break with that consensus.

The weaponisation of anti-Semitism is a means of cloaking in a moral shield British foreign policy in the Middle East. It would appear that for all its posturing, the Green Party is just another pro-capitalist, establishment party whose aim is to green capitalism.  When the British ruling class has adopted a definition of anti-Semitism that embraces Israel you feel obliged to join in.

Kind regards

Tony Greenstein

Ryanair Tells Victim of Racist Abuse to Move Seats and then Comforts the Racist – BOYCOTT RYANAIR

October 22, 2018, 4:52 pm

≫ Next: When it comes to Foul Mouthed Abuse, noone can outdo Zionist Lawyers like Mark Lewis

≪ Previous: The Muddled and Confused Response of the Green Party to the IHRA is exemplified by Caroline Lucas’s Email to me

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Anti-fascist Video and Video on Albania During the War, the Only Nazi Occupied Country Where the Number of Jews Increased

Delsie Gayle, an elderly and disabled Black woman, was travelling from Barcelona to Stansted when she was assailed by a fellow passenger as an “ugly black bastard” among other epithets. What was the reaction of Ryanair? Not to move the abuser out of the airline and into the custody of the Spanish Police but to move the victim.  And then, to add insult to injury, a member of the cabin crew inquires as to whether the abuser is alright.

Just one passenger intervened to help the woman giving an insight into the kind of passenger who flies on this airline.  Ryanair has said that because they have referred the matter to the Essex Police they cannot comment. That is a lie.  There is nothing to stop Ryanair commenting on their lamentable behaviour.

It is difficult to see what British Police can do since the incident happened in Spain and Ryanair is registered in Dublin.  It is possible that Delsie Gayle will be able to sue Michael O’Leary, the owner of Ryanair because her own ticket would have been bought in the UK.

In the meantime what we can do is urge a Boycott of Ryanair.

Story sourced from Canary

Below are two videos.  One is from Momentum on racism and fascism and is well worth watching.

Film about Albania under Nazi Occupation

The other is a film of one of the more unknown facts about the Holocaust. Despite the Islamaphobic rubbish one gets from Zionists and their apologists today, most people are unaware that Albania, which was first occupied by the Italians until September 1943 and then the Nazis, was the only Nazi occupied country in Europe where not only was no Jewish person deported but the Jewish population increased from 200 to approximately 2,000. Up till 1942 the Albanian embassy in Berlin issued visas to refugees and until the summer of 1943 refugees obtained protection in Albania.

Albania is about 70% Muslim. Of course given the way the Zionists rewrite history to make Muslims the Jews main enemy, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Holocaust happened in the Middle East.

That was why 3 years ago Netanyahu tried to rewrite history by pretending that the blame for the Holocaust was not that of Hitler, but the Palestinian Mufti. See Rewriting the Holocaust

Tony Greenstein

When it comes to Foul Mouthed Abuse, noone can outdo Zionist Lawyers like Mark Lewis

October 23, 2018, 3:03 pm

≫ Next: Abbas and Hamas Abuse and Torture of Palestinians is a Gift to the Israeli Government

≪ Previous: Ryanair Tells Victim of Racist Abuse to Move Seats and then Comforts the Racist – BOYCOTT RYANAIR

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Pro-Israel lawyer Matthew Berlow sanctioned by the Law Society for racist smears against Scottish PSC member

When you think of members of the legal profession you think of the scales of justice and the statue of liberty. Justice blind to all special interests, political causes and favours. Lawyers are generally thought of as people who carefully weigh the pros and cons of an issue, always willing to see the others’ viewpoint. They are officially Officers of the Court and their first duty is to see justice is done. But when it comes to Zionist lawyers then you can throw all of that out of the window.

Support for the Jewish supremacism and the State of Israel is their first priority. They are not the first nor the last to put the interests of the State before the interests of justice. You only need to recall John Yoo and Jay Bybee two White House lawyers who produced legal opinions to justify torture. As the New York Times put it, they ‘were not acting as fair-minded analysts of the law but as facilitators of a scheme to evade it. The White House decision to brutalize detainees already had been made. Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee provided legal cover.’

Strange as it may see, NW Friends of Israel, which has previously worked with Tommy Robinson's EDL, had nothing to say about this meeting.  Perhaps not surprising since many of their members were in attendance

The same is true of the Zionist lawyers below. Support for Israel, right or wrong, is their only concern.  Land confiscation, virulent state racism, apartheid laws are all explained away by Jewish exceptionalism. Their legal training is but a weapon to be employed against supporters of the Palestinians. Shouting ‘anti-Semitism’at every opportunity gives these lawyers the ideal pretext to engage in wholesale abuse.

Mark Lewis

Speaking of bigots, none come more obnoxious than Mark Lewis, who made a name for himself in the hacking cases against the News of the World. Lewis is an ardent supporter of Herut UK, the British branch of Likud.  It is an organisation that is steeped in racism. Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud Prime Minister, is famous for going on Facebook at the last election to warn Jewish voters that ‘droves’of Arabs have gone to the polls. Likud has presided over a dramatic increase in Israeli state racism, most recently sealed with the Jewish Nation State Law.

Lewis, who spoke at the relaunch meeting of Herut UK, is of the opinion that whatever the Israeli government does should be supported by British Jews and opposition to Zionism and Israel is automatically anti-Semitic. He therefore defends without reservation the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the theft of Palestinian land, the Jewish only roads etc. Indeed he will shortly become a settler himself and no doubt will excuse attacks on Palestinians, burning of crops, polluting water sources, demolition of houses by the need to fight ‘anti-Semitism’.

Like Berlow, Lewis is nothing if not abusive.  So much so that he has got himself hauled up before the Solicitor’s Regulation Authority on charges of abusing people on social media.  His excuse is that they are all neo-Nazis but that is but a pretext.

Lewis is a partner of Mandy Blumenthall, the representative of Herut UK. In August 2018, Lewis and Blumenthal told the Victoria Derbyshire programme that they are quitting the UK as they no longer feel safe because of anti-Semitismand they will move to Israel in December where they can practice their racism without being called to account. Blumenthal naturally lays the blame at the door of Jeremy Corbyn.Derbyshire, alone amongst BBC journalists gave them a good grilling and showed how vacuous are their claims.

Mark's day of rage

On 9 August 2014 when Israel was bombing Gaza, Mark Lewis railed on Twitteragainst anti-zionists, calling them anti-Jewishracist scum. It started at 2:33pm with Mark's tweet:

Why, as a British Jew, I’m terrified by anti-Semitism in my country.

Ruthless approach to antisemitism

The Times of Israel reportedthat “Lewis takes a ruthless approach, believing that it’s necessary to be aggressive against anti-Semites on social media.”

“Someone can be a Nazi, but at least [if they are taken to court] they can be a homeless Nazi,” he says. “I’m quite happy to take their homes off them. If these people would have rational debate, I would do that [instead], but they are nutters who have conspiratorial theories and I will never change their outlook.".

Making Craig Murray "homeless"

In September 2017, it was reported that Jake Wallis Simons, associate editor of the Daily Mail Online, was suing Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, for £40,000 in damages plus £100,000 legal costs for lawyer Mark Lewis, who was representing Simons in a High Court case commencing on 7 November 2017.

Craig Murray wrotethat “This case has the potential to bankrupt me and blight the lives of my wife and children. I have specifically been threatened by Mr Lewis with bankruptcy.”

Craig Murray reacted:

"I sincerely hope [Mark Lewis] does not consider me a Nazi, though plainly this case is started by my falsely being smeared as an anti-Semite. But no matter how objectionable somebody may find my views on Israel/Palestine, how does it serve justice that “at least my”wife and 8-year-old son “can be homeless.” That is however precisely what Mr Lewis seeks to achieve and to be plain, he has threatened me in person with bankruptcy

High-profile solicitor facing tribunal over online spats with “neo-Nazis”

Law Gazette, 28.9.18.

Mr Lewis has been outspoken in his support of Israel. A former director of UK Lawyers for Israel, in June he halted the pro-Palestinian Al Quds rally in central London for an hour by refusing to move his wheelchair.

He said at the time that he did so to protest against Hezbollah flags and “inflammatory rhetoric”....

The newspaper also said that Mr Lewis took a “ruthless approach, believing that it’s necessary to be aggressive against anti-Semites on social media”.

Mr Lewis told Legal Futures that he could not comment on the case beyond saying that he would “fully defend” himself and that “it will be a very interesting battle”.

There have been an increasing number of disciplinary cases involving social media posts, made more acute where the solicitor identifies as such. Last year, the SRA issued a warning notice to solicitors on how to conduct themselves on social media. Media lawyer Mark Lewis to face SDT over social media comments

High profile media lawyer Mark Lewis – who came to public attention with his work on the phone-hacking cases – is to face a disciplinary tribunal over alleged comments on social media.

Mark Lewis

It emerged today that the Solicitors Regulation Authority has decided to prosecute Lewis, a partner at London firm Seddons.

The allegations are that in May 2017 he used his Facebook account to post ‘offensive and profane communications’towards a third party.

The SRA also alleges that between July 2015 and December 2016 he used his Twitter account, which publicly identified him as a solicitor, to post offensive and profane communications.

Robert Festenstein

None comes nastier than Robert Festenstein, a bankruptcy solicitor.  He is essentially a fascist. So it was no surprise when he played the part of a solicitor in a videowith none other than Tommy Robinson.  Festenstein is a founder of Jewish Human Rights Watch, an organisation that is dedicated to opposing human rights for Palestinians and anti-Zionists.

In May 2017 Festenstein wroteto the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London attempting to close down the Palestine Expo 2017 Festival on the grounds it was a ‘Jewish hate festival’ despite it having numerous Jewish speakers like Ilan Pappe or Miko Peled. One thing JHRW shares with groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is a hatred for free speech and debate, the hall mark of fascism. 

The letter from Festenstein was one long lie.  It began with a lie: ‘We act for Jewish Human Rights Watch – JHRW.”

It would be more truthful to have said ‘I am Jewish Human Rights Watch – JHRW.” There are number of companies under the name JHRW or similar.

There is JHRW Educationin which Festenstein is the sole director.

There is Jewish Rights Watch in which Festenstein is one of 3 directors.

In short Festenstein deliberately disguised his own connections to JHRW in order to make his letter seem more plausible. It would be interesting to see who paid him for the letter and how much!

A letter of total deception - Fenstenstein writes on behalf of a client who just happens to be himself

The next lie was to write that ‘’Whilst our client has no difficulty with legitimate protest, it is most concerned that you are allowing a group with terrorist links to operate an event on your premises.’ Yet more lies.  Like most Zionist activists Festenstein has the greatest difficulty with any protest to do with Palestine and the suggestion that there was any link with ‘terrorists’ is risible.  Given Festenstein’s links with the far-Right and Tommy Robinson he should perhaps have been looking nearer to home.

Recently members of JHRW attacked a Palestine Solidarity Campaign meeting in Manchester and are suspected of being involved in an attack on a Jewish Voice for Labour meeting at Labour Party conference in Liverpool.

Festenstein is also suspected of being involved in a meetingbetween Tommy Robinson and a dozen members of the Manchester Jewish community.

Festenstein isn't your run of the mill solicitor. He was fined £20,000 by the Solicitor's Disciplinary Tribunal in November 10th for a series of breaches of the rules governing solicitors. They are detailed below. He was charged with a second solicitor whom he had employed, Bryan Slater.  Slater was struck off the rolls. In short Festenstein is a solicitor whom most people would give a wide berth to.

Jonathan Goldberg QC

The other Zionist lawyer I have become acquainted with is more of a clown than a villain like Lewis and Festenstein.  I refer to Jonathan Goldberg QC, who is a patron of the far-Right Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. In an email exchange with a friend of mine he asked:

‘hear your friend Greenstein got his just deserts.

What was the problem with his family ? Was he an abused child ?

The ‘logic’ of this statement being that Jewish opponents of Zionism must have suffered ‘child abuse’.  Apart from anything else it trivialises the very real problem of child abuse.

I asked the learned QC what kind of idiot attributes political differences to child abuse. Because Zionists cannot perceive why anyone might oppose the ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies that Israel follows, critics are seen as suffering from psychological trauma of one kind or another. Goldberg responded that he was aware my father was a rabbi but that

‘where sons strive so desperately to dishonour their parents and negate everything they stood for publicly, as you have done so prominently, it often stems from a history of abuse, whether verbal, physical or worst of all  sexual.’

Whatever his talents, Goldberg’s expertise clearly doesn’t extend to the medical or psychological field. Even the most brilliant of Zionists, and there is no doubt that Goldberg is a very capable if not brilliant lawyer, unlike Lewis and Festenstein who are merely functionaries, Goldberg is nonetheless completely incapable of understanding why many Jews reject Zionism.

The attribution of political disagreement to  the realm of psychiatric causes was characteristic of Stalinism which incarcerated many dissidents in mental asylums.  Goldberg, for all his talents, is incapable of understand that it isn’t rejection of one’s parents but a rejection of Zionism and what it does to the Palestinians that more and more Jews find unappealing. 

Goldberg is probably a good example of how people can be brilliant in a narrow area like law but narrow minded bigots in all other areas. Despite an inauspicious start we continued our conversation and it became a little less heated. Indeed Jonathan despite continually promising that he would terminate the correspondence clearly couldn’t resist the temptation to engage with me!  A copy of the correspondence is below and the affair was the subject of a blog post. The Wit and Wisdom of Jonathan Goldberg QC

Goldberg is probably best remembered for his caustic comments on the failed litigation in Fraser –v- University College Union where it was alleged that the union’s Boycott of Israel policy discriminated against Jewish members of UCU. The Tribunal comprehensively rejected the case brought by Fraser rulingthat the case ‘represents an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious means.’  Fraser was represented by Anthony Julius of Mischcon de Reya, the solicitors for the Princess Diana Fund who nearly bankrupted it with his hubris and fees!  Goldberg describedthe bringing of the case as ‘an act of epic folly by all concerned.... You only bring such showcase litigation if you are certain to win.”

Anthony Julius, who had brought the case, demonstrated a staggering degree of incompetence. For example all the claims were outside the time limits which are 3 months, at an Employment Tribunal. It is clear to all but Julius that Zionism is not a protected characteristic (thus meriting the protection of the Equalities Act 2010). Julius isn’t an employment solicitor and he was clearly out of his depths. Julius seems to have taken this criticism to heart.  Previously a flamboyant character he has gone to grass. Nothing has been heard of him since. 

Matthew Berlow

Below is the story of how criminal lawyer and Glasgow Friends of Israel activist Matthew Berlow fell foul of the Scottish Law Society because of his foul mouthed racist rantings. Berlow smeared and abused a Palestinian activist.  Justice however caught up with him as he has now been fined £1,750 by the Scottish Law Society in addition to being instructed to attend Diversity Training.  It is this latter punishment that Berlow resents more than anything else since he considers being Jewish grants him immunity from being a common and garden bigot. A report of this case is in the Herald on Sunday is entitled Diversity training for Jewish lawyer who called pro-Palestinian campaigners 'scummy racists'.

The Case of Matthew Berlow and Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Matthew Berlow is a member of Glasgow Friends of Israel, a far-Right racist group that uses Nazi style language when talking about 'euthanising' i.e. murdering Palestinians -

Berlow described Dr Karolin Hijazi as a “thin-skinned…wannabe social justice warrior and a “snowflake”, a term popular with US White supremacists and the extreme right generally to attack those who stand up to them. A defender of the Israeli army, a force charged with war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, Berlow has agreed to pay the Law Society of Scotland a £1,750 fine for his behaviour but is upset that he has been mandated to undergo “diversity training”.

In 2016, the Aberdeen Branch of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) protested an Israeli Dead Sea cosmetics company which profited from the Israeli occupation and apartheid structures. Berlow, a staunch defender of a state that is openly racist, attacked demonstrators as “scummy racists”, claiming bizarrely that the Israeli company was merely an outlet for hatred of Jews, a "soft Jewish target to aim your bile at”. Protests across Scotland fuelled by Israel's massacres of thousands of Palestinians led to the Israeli company closing down and leaving the UK.

Dr Hijazi later reported Berlow to the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, which found “potential conduct issues". The Law Society of Scotland investigated and received Berlow's defence that his comments were not directed at "snowflake" Dr Hijazi but at the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Karolin Hijazi is a long-term, committed Palestinian campaigner. She was jailed by Israel in 2012 when a group of Scots joined the Welcome to Palestine effort to reach Bethlehem to help build a school. She refused food during detention with many of the others and was deported along with other British and Scots activists.

The Law Society of Scotland concluded that Berlow had used “derogatory language...damaging to the reputation of both the profession as a whole and of the individual solicitor concerned”. It would seem Berlow couldn't stop digging, for the Law Society judged his written defence of his original actions to be “derogatory and aggressive".

He was found guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct and ordered to pay Dr Hijazi £100 compensation on top of the £1,750 fine.

Berlow will appeal the diversity training order on the basis of a 2017 attack on Scottish BDS campaigners by a minor pro-Israel blogger, David Collier, acting on behalf of the Israeli Embassy. The report claims SPSC is an anti-semitic organisation that denies the Holocaust.

Dr Hijazi said she found Berlow’s comments “particularly disturbing, having campaigned against racism, discrimination and bigotry all my life”. SPSC stands foursquare for Palestinian rights and opposes anti-semitism and vile Holocaust denial, which we consider no less repulsive than Berlow's denying that the Palestinian people suffered a brutal ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 and subsequently.

In any event it is advisable to be sceptical about any utterance from Berlow and his comrades at Glasgow Friends of Israel; the Friends of Israeli Snipers openly use the dehumanising language of "euthanising"Palestinians.

Even after Berlow appeared as a prosecution witness in Glasgow Sheriff Court in a failed three-year effort by Scottish prosecutors and pro-Israel lobbyists to secure convictions for racism, i.e. antisemitism, against myself and Jim Watson, he and I maintained an email exchange. (I like the adage, "Hate the sin but not the sinner".)

During our exchanges, I pointed out what he knew, that his Friends of Israel were still lying about the verdict of the recent trial.

Matthew Berlow replied: "I will post the truth about the verdict AND I will make it clear that you are not anti Semitic and cannot be responsible for those that may attach themselves to your cause but that you try and root it out to the best of your ability...". In a separate email, dated 1 August 2017, Mathew acknowledged that "There is no doubt that you are not anti Semitic as you eloquently refute that at every opportunity..."

Normally, SPSC and other campaiging groups have to accept the most grotesque inventions from pro-Israeli groups since their deep pockets and our modest means make a defamation trial very difficult. The successful challenge by Dr Hijazi to unfounded attacks and smears, of which there have been many demented examples, should inspire those maligned in this way to fight back.

Mick Napier

West Calder

21 October 2018

Abbas and Hamas Abuse and Torture of Palestinians is a Gift to the Israeli Government

October 24, 2018, 7:09 pm

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Palestine: Authorities Crush Dissent

A new Report by Human Rights Watch Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent finds that both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority systematically use torture as an instrument of policy. The Report begins with an overview of what the situation in the Occupied Territories is:

In the 25 years since Palestinians gained a degree of self-rule over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, their authorities have established machineries of repression to crush dissent, including through the use of torture.

Both the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in Gaza have in recent years carried out scores of arbitrary arrests for peaceful criticism of the authorities, particularly on social media, among independent journalists, on university campuses, and at demonstrations. As the Fatah-Hamas feud deepened despite attempts at reconciliation, PA security services have targeted supporters of Hamas and vice versa. Relying primarily on overly broad laws that criminalize activity such as causing “sectarian strife” or insulting “higher authorities,” the PA and Hamas use detention to punish critics and deter them and others from further activism. In detention, security forces routinely taunt, threaten, beat, and force detainees into painful stress positions for hours at a time.

It is no surprise that the PA, which is a sub-contractor for the Israeli State and military, should torture Palestinians. This group of thugs and misfits has no other reason to exist other than to prevent a new Palestinian uprising. As the Quisling-in-Chief, Mahmoud Abbas once said, co-operation with the Israeli security services is ‘sacrosanct’. Or as the Times of Israel put it:

Strange as this may sound, despite the ongoing political schism between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and the open hatred between Ramallah and Washington, the security coordination remains in place, at the direction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and both Israeli and Palestinian security forces have a share in preventing attacks on Israelis.

What will be of surprise to many is that Hamas, which purports to be a Palestinian resistance organisation, should also engage in the torture and abuse of Palestinians. It should not however be that surprising. As an Islamist organisation that was the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is a right-wing religious group. It has no social programme worthy of the name. Like all similar religious groups its politics are backward looking, socially and politically. Islam is a means of justifying repression. Hamas’s origins lie in the desire of the Israeli state to find a counterweight to secular Palestinian nationalism. Hamas was virtually the creationof the Israeli state.

The actions of both Hamas and Fateh/PA are deeply shameful. The Times of Israel article below is headed ‘Calls by Palestinians to safeguard rights ring hollow’. After all how can Palestinians oppose Israel’s use of torture when the so-called Palestinian organisations do exactly the same? It is no surprise that the Zionist media will exploit this for all its worth.  Both Abbas and Haniyeh, the Hamas Prime Minister, should hang their heads in shame.

There is no point in either Hamas or the PA denying that torture is routinely used. The Report by Human Rights Watch is clearly a thorough and painstaking one. Neither Hamas or the PA are prepared to record all interrogations so their denials will cut no ice.

Those who have had illusions in Hamas should, as a result of this, think again. It would seem that their main goal is not to create a free and independent Palestine but a police state run according to their interpretation of Islam.

In using torture and other methods of silencing dissent Hamas is playing the Zionist game.

Palestine: Authorities Crush Dissent

Arbitrary Arrests, Torture Systematic

 (Ramallah) – The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas authorities in Gaza routinely arrest and torture peaceful critics and opponents, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. As the Palestinian Authority-Hamas feud has deepened, each has targeted the other’s supporters.

The 149-page report, “‘Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent:’ Arbitrary Arrest and Torture Under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas,” evaluates patterns of arrest and detention conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 25 years after the Oslo Accords granted Palestinians a degree of self-rule over these areas and more than a decade after Hamas seized effective control over the Gaza Strip. Human Rights Watch detailed more than two dozen cases of people detained for no clear reason beyond writing a critical article or Facebook post or belonging to the wrong student group or political movement.

“Twenty-five years after Oslo, Palestinian authorities have gained only limited power in the West Bank and Gaza, but yet, where they have autonomy, they have developed parallel police states,”

said Tom Porteous, deputy program director at Human Rights Watch. “Calls by Palestinian officials to safeguard Palestinian rights ring hollow as they crush dissent.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed 147 witnesses, including former detainees and their relatives, lawyers, and representatives of nongovernmental groups, and reviewed photographic evidence, medical reports, and court documents. The report reflects substantive responses to the findings from the main security agencies implicated in the underlying abuses.

Systematic arbitrary arrests and torture violate major human rights treaties to which Palestine recently acceded. Few security officers have been prosecuted and none have been convicted for wrongful arrest or torture, as far as Human Rights Watch has been able to determine.

“The fact that Israel systematically violates Palestinians’ most basic rights is no reason to remain silent in the face of the systematic repression of dissent and the torture Palestinian security forces are perpetrating,”

Palestinian riot police confront demonstrators protesting security coordination between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel, in the West Bank city of Ramallah on June 23, 2014. © 2014 Mohamad Torokman/Reuters

said Shawan Jabarin, executive director of the Palestinian human rights organization al-Haq and a member of the Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa Advisory Committee.

Human Rights Watch met with the Palestinian Authority Intelligence Services in Ramallah, but was unable to accept an offer from Hamas authorities to meet in Gaza because Israel refused to grant permits for senior Human Rights Watch officials to enter the Gaza Strip for this purpose. Israeli authorities also rejected Human Rights Watch’s request for senior representatives to enter Gaza during October 2018 to present this report at a news conference.  

Both authorities deny that abuses amount to more than isolated cases that are investigated and for which wrongdoers are held to account. The evidence that Human Rights Watch collected contradicts these claims.

Palestinian authorities often rely on overly broad laws that criminalize insulting “higher authorities,” creating “sectarian strife,” or “harming the revolutionary unity” to detain dissidents for days or weeks, only to release most of them without referring them to trial, but often leaving charges outstanding. Palestinian Authority security forces also held 221 Palestinians for various periods between January 2017 and August 2018 in administrative detention without charge or trial under a regional governor’s order, according to the Palestinian statutory watchdog Independent Commission for Human Rights.  

A number of former Palestinian Authority detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch had also been detained by Israel, which coordinates with Palestinian Authority forces on security issues. In Gaza, Hamas authorities sometimes condition release on the detainee signing a commitment to halt criticism or protests.

On September 27, the Independent Commission for Human Rights reported that Hamas security forces in Gaza had arrested more than 50 people affiliated with Fatah and that Palestinian Authority forces in the West Bank had detained more than 60 affiliated with Hamas, in the span of just a few days.

In the cases documented, Palestinian forces often threatened, beat, and forced detainees into painful stress positions for prolonged periods, including using cables or ropes to hoist up arms  behind the back. Police often used similar tactics to obtain confessions by people detained on drug or other criminal charges. Security forces also routinely coerced detainees into providing access to their cellphones and social media accounts. These measures appear aimed at punishing dissidents and deterring them and others from further activism.

While the authorities regularly receive citizen complaints and have systems to investigate them, only a minority have resulted in a finding of wrongdoing, according to data provided by the agencies. Even fewer led to an administrative sanction or referral for criminal prosecution.

Palestinian authorities should abide by the international human rights treaties they acceded to over the last five years. Hamas authorities said in a letter to Human Rights Watch that it considered itself committed to uphold all international treaties ratified by the State of Palestine. Compliance requires Palestinian authorities to ensure that an independent body inspects detention sites and that the authorities investigate complaints credibly and impose appropriate sanctions if warranted.

The systematic practice of torture by Palestinian authorities may amount to a crime against humanity prosecutable at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Human Rights Watch has long encouraged the ICC prosecutor to open a formal probe into Israeli and Palestinian conduct in Palestine, which is a party to the ICC.

The US and European states provide support to Palestinian Authority security forces. While the US in 2018 slashed funding for health and education services for Palestinians, including all its support for the United Nations Relief Works and Agency (UNRWA), it continued to set aside funding for security forces, including allocating US $60 million in International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) nonlethal assistance to Palestinian Authority security forces for the 2018 fiscal year and $35 million for the 2019 fiscal year. Qatar, Iran, and Turkey financially support Hamas authorities. All of these countries should suspend assistance to agencies that routinely torture dissidents – including, for the Palestinian Authority, the Intelligence Services, Preventive Security, and Joint Security Committee, and, for Hamas, Internal Security – as long as systematic torture and other serious abuses continue.

“The attacks by both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas on dissidents and demonstrators, reporters and bloggers, are both systematic and unpunished,”

Porteous said.

“Governments that want to help the Palestinian people develop the rule of law should not support security forces that actively undermine it.”

Accounts from Former Detainees

“I was heading home. At the Einab checkpoint, I happened to see the prime minister’s convoy being held up on the checkpoint. I filmed this scene. After the car I was in and the convoy was allowed to cross the checkpoint, we were stopped by one of his escorts. I was arrested and taken to the station of the Preventative Security Forces in Tulkarm. I was detained in Tulkarm and in Ramallah for four days.”

·         Jihad Barakat, 29, journalist on his arrest by Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces in the West Bank in July 2017.

“I had written on a hot summer day, ‘Do your children [referring to Hamas leaders] sleep on the floor like ours do?’ I think the post bothered security forces and, as a result, I was summoned to appear before Internal Security and later was charged with the crime of ‘misuse of technology’… I was detained for 15 days... Later, I was released after an agreement with the Interior Ministry. The agreement pledged not to write or incite against the government.”

·         Amer Balousha, 26-year-old activist and journalist on his arrest in July 2017 by Hamas authorities in Gaza.

“A plainclothes officer met me at the door [of the Intelligence Services Prison in Jericho]. He blindfolded me, handcuffed my hands behind my back, and started hitting me and slamming me against the walls… this lasted for about 10 minutes. The officer took me to the warden’s office and took the blindfold off, telling me that this was my “welcome”... [an officer] then said hang him, as in take him to shabeh. I was transferred from the office to the toilets, there they blindfolded me again, handcuffed me behind my back, put a piece of cloth and rope at the center of my handcuffs and pulled it up to the side of the door. There was a hook between the door and the ceiling. They pulled the cloth up, raising my hands behind my back. My legs were not shackled, and the tip of my legs were touching the ground. I was held in this stress position for 45 minutes. An officer hit me with a big stick on my back, between my shoulders, more than once... After they put me down, I felt my hands were numb up to my shoulders and I could not hold myself up… [the next day] the Juicer (nickname for his interrogator in Jericho) told me that ‘I promise you that you will not leave this place except on a wheelchair.”

·         Alaa Zaqeq, 27, detained by PA security forces in April 2017 for three weeks based on his activism as a graduate student with a student group affiliated with Hamas.

“I was forced to stand blindfolded the entire day in a room called the bus. There were 5 or 10 people with me. On occasion they sat us down in small chairs, but we needed permission for everything we did, including sleeping or speaking. I spent 30 days there… After the first day, the beating started, they asked me to open my hands and started striking me with a cable and whipping my feet.”

·         Fouad Jarada, 34-year-old journalist with the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, arrested in June 2017 by Hamas forces three days after a Facebook post critical of a Hamas ally and a string of critical news reports. Authorities held him for more than two months on charges of “harming revolutionary unity,” releasing him only when the PA agreed to arrest journalists considered close to Hamas in the West Bank.

“I still have nightmares… [that] the cell is strangling me and I cannot breathe.”

·         Fares Jbour, 24, held for 24 days in January 2017 over his activities with a Hamas-affiliated student group at a university in Hebron in the West Bank

“The guys are afraid of writing. They don't try. They don't share. They don’t even put “like” to anyone who wrote anything criticizing the government. They are scared.”

·         Mohammad Lafi, 24-year-old rapper from the Jabalia Refugee Camp in Gaza, held for five days in January 2017 by Hamas authorities after he released a music video entitled “Your Right” that called for people to demonstrate and participated in protests around the electricity crisis.

“I feel I am being monitored, as if I’m under a microscope. I was released, but, until now, I feel I am not free. They broke our desire to defend citizens’ rights.”

·         Taghreed Abu Teer, 47-year-old journalist with the Palestinian Broading Corporation, detained for 11 days in April 2017 by Hamas authorities after attending conferences for rival Fatah in Ramallah.

“I live in a country where it is forbidden to express my opinion. This country is not the one we dream about, not at all. I don’t think that there is a Palestinian who would accept that all this struggle would go, and all the years of our lives, not just ours, but those before us, so that in the end we would have a system of government that has taken the shape of a dictatorship. It cannot be… it is very painful that we have a regime before ever having a state. Our problem with the PA is that they are building security forces and controlling people when we don’t even control the checkpoint.”

·         Hamza Zbeidat, 31-year-old who works for a development nongovernmental group, detained for two days by PA security forces in May 2016 for a Facebook post that called on Palestinians “to struggle against the PA like we struggle against Israel.”

Abbas and Hamas use systematic torture to crush dissent – Human Rights Watch

In major NGO report on Palestinian Authority and Gaza, dozens of ex-detainees — critics, activists, political opponents — describe brutality including beating, forced contortion

By TOI staff and AP23 October 2018, 10:00 am11

Illustrative: The hands of a young man tied with rope (nito100; iStock by Getty Images)

Human Rights Watch on Tuesday accused both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas of routinely engaging in “systematic” unwarranted arrests and torture of critics, suspected dissidents and political opponents, and of developing “parallel police states” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, respectively. 

In a 149-page report based on interviews with 147 witnesses, Human Rights Watch detailed a common method of abuse and torture known as shabeh — used both by the PA and Hamas — in which detainees are placed in painful physical positions for lengthy periods of time. Such practices cause distress and trauma to detainees, while often leaving “little or no trace on the body,” the report said.

The widespread occurrence of such brutality indicates that “torture is governmental policy for both the PA and Hamas,” HRW stated.

Shabeh techniques include forcing detainees into squats, powerfully stretching their arms above or behind them, and leaving them standing or sitting in child-sized chairs for hours on end.

Palestinian security troops in Hebron, November 14, 2017. (Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90)

In one example from Gaza, 

“a PA civil servant, arrested after a friend tagged him in a Facebook post calling for protests on the electricity crisis, spent most of his days in the Internal Security’s Gaza City detention center subjected to positional abuse… causing him to feel ‘severe pain in my kidneys and spine’ and as if his neck would ‘break’ and his ‘body is tearing up inside,'” the report said.

In the West Bank, a detained journalist had his hands tied by rope to the ceiling of a holding room while officers “slowly pulled the rope to apply pressure to his arms, which caused him to feel so much pain that he had to ask an officer to pull his pants up after he used the toilet because he could not do it himself.”

According to the report, “Palestinian forces in both the West Bank and Gaza regularly use threats of violence, taunts, solitary confinement, and beatings, including lashing and whipping of the feet of detainees, to elicit confessions, punish, and intimidate activists.”

 

 The report, titled “Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent,” cited more than 20 cases in which activists were arrested for critical news articles or social media posts, as well as membership in certain groups or movements frowned upon by authorities. Hamas and the PA regularly abused each other’s activists in the territories they control, it added.

Saying the systematic use of torture could amount to a crime against humanity under the United Nations’ Convention against Torture, HRW called on the United States, the European Union and other international powers to halt all aid to the Palestinian agencies responsible for persecution and abuse — including the PA Preventative Security Forces, General Intelligence Services and Joint Security Committee, and the Hamas-run Internal Security — “until the authorities curb those practices and hold those responsible for abuse accountable.”

“Twenty five years after Oslo, Palestinian authorities have gained only limited power in the West Bank and Gaza, but yet, where they have autonomy, they have developed parallel police states,” said Tom Porteous, deputy program director at Human Rights Watch.

“Calls by Palestinian officials to safeguard Palestinian rights ring hollow as they crush dissent,” he said.

“Systematic arbitrary arrests and torture violate major human rights treaties to which Palestine recently acceded,” the rights group said, and warned that the “systematic practice of torture by Palestinian authorities may amount to a crime against humanity prosecutable at the International Criminal Court.”

Hamas security forces in Gaza City, April 4, 2013. (Wissam Nassar/FLASH90)

Both Hamas and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority denied the accusations.

The two Palestinian factions split in 2007 after Hamas violently seized the Gaza Strip from forces loyal to PA President Mahmoud Abbas. For more than a decade, Hamas has maintained an iron grip on power and suppressed any signs of public dissent, including street protests and on social media.

Despite having Western backing, Abbas has also silenced dissent in the areas of the West Bank he administers under past agreements with Israel. Last year, he clamped down on social media and news websites with a vaguely worded decree that critics say allows his government to jail anyone on charges of harming “national unity” or the “social fabric.”

Mohammed Khatib, a 20-year-old law student and activist with Hamas’ student branch in the West Bank, told The Associated Press he was arrested last month and held for 19 days at a Palestinian intelligence center in the West Bank city of Ramallah. He said he was forced to stand for hours at a time and hung by his handcuffed hands to a door for 15 minutes, a stress position meant to cause pain but leave no sign of injury.

“This is not only a violation of human rights, it is a violation of human dignity, a violation of basic morals,” he said, adding that he believed the aim was to intimidate him.

HRW’s report also highlights other tactics used to silence Palestinian dissent and punish activists, among them the seizing of phones, leaving investigations and charges open, and coercing detainees to promise to stop any further criticism.

In Gaza, Taghreed Abu Teer, a 47-year-old journalist, told the AP that she was held by Hamas authorities for 11 days and interrogated under “humiliating circumstances” for her activities with the rival Fatah movement.

Palestinian police take part in a training session in the West Bank city of Ramallah in 2014. (Issam Rimawi/Flash90)

She said she was kept in a dark cell for days at a time and forced to stand for lengthy periods. Although she was not physically beaten, she said she could hear the screams of men being tortured nearby, and that at one point, a man with a whip threatened to beat her as well. More than a year and a half later, she still cries when she recalls the “unforgettable experience.”

“As long as I was in the cell, I was wondering what had caused me to end up here,”she said. She spoke at a relative’s home so her six children would not hear about the ordeal.

Abu Teer said interrogators threatened to charge her with collaboration with Israel, widely feared as a stigma, and that most of the questions focused on a three-day trip she made to the West Bank, where she met senior Fatah officials and briefed them about the situation in Gaza. She said interrogators accused her of inciting the Palestinian Authority to make financial cuts and other punitive measures against Gaza, a tactic meant to squeeze Hamas.

She denied all the allegations, saying she had only led protests and lobbied for ending the Hamas-Fatah split.

While she was never charged, Hamas officers advised her “to be quiet” and focus on her home and family, “which I considered a veiled threat rather than advice,” she added.

alestinian security forces routinely torture critics, rights group says

The Lie of Israel’s Claim to be the only Middle East state to respect freedom of religion

October 26, 2018, 8:32 am

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Despite its propaganda claims to the contrary, Israel is not a country that respects freedom of religion. The story below concerns the attack within the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on a peaceful demonstration by its priests.

Zionist Propaganda Claim

Only a few days ago the heads of the Roman Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox churches in Jerusalem called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to block draft legislation, which is reportedly aimed at expropriating their property.

In recent days a cemetery at a Christian monastery near the central Israeli town of Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem, has been vandalized. The monks responsible for its upkeep, who visit the cemetery every few days, found some 30 smashed headstones on Wednesday.  A report Headstones Smashed in Christian Cemetery Near Jerusalem in Suspected Hate Crimetold how: this was the second time that the cemetery of the Beit Jamal Monastery was defaced. 

In 2013, a firebomb was thrown at a door and hateful slogans scrawled on the monastery walls. It was also damaged in a hate crime in 2016, when unknown perpetrators entered the prayer house and smashed statues. ‘At the Beit Jamal Monastery for the fourth time in five years headstones and crosses have been smashed.’

Imagine the outcry if a Jewish synagogue in London was vandalised four times in 5 years.  The outcry about antisemitism would be heard from John O'Groats to Lands End yet in Israel attacks on Christian and Moslem places of worship are a regular occurrence, aided and abetted by the atmosphere of religious intolerance in a government which doesn't even respect liberal or reform strands of Judaism. See Israel Tells Reform Jews: You’re Not Really Jewish, but Your Money Is Just Jewish Enough

Among a large section of the National Religious sector in Israel, there is nothing but contempt and hatred for Christianity notwithstanding the support of Christian Zionism for Israel. When the leader of the fascist Lehava, a group which campaigns against miscegenation (mixed race sexual relations) Benzi Gopstein called a few years ago for arson at mosques and churches nothing was done to prosecute him despite a complaintfrom the Vatican. Burning of Christian churches in Israel justified, far-Right Jewish leader says

Unsurprisingly in the past few years there have been repeated attempts at arson at major churches such as the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fisheries. Unlike other arson attacks, the Police secured a conviction of Yinon Reuveni, who was sentencedto 4 years imprisonment, for an attack which almost destroyed one of the most ancient and important churches in Israel.

According to Ha’aretzsince 2009 53 mosques and churches have been vandalised with only 9 prosecutions.

We have also seen direct attacks by the Israeli State with the advent of the Muezzin law which prevents the Muslim call to prayer in the morning by mosques via loudspeakers. No such inhibition or restriction is placed on Jewish use of amplified sound. Ramped-up muezzin bill allows police to confiscate mosques’ loudspeakers

The arrests and attack on priests at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem are not new. In recent months there seems to have been a constant war of attrition against one of the most holy sites in the Christian religion, where Christ was reputed to have been crucified and entombed. See Israel’s War on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre forces it to close

Tony Greenstein  

In video - Israeli forces assault priests, detain one in Jerusalem

Oct. 24, 2018 11:49 A.M. (Updated: Oct. 25, 2018 3:53 P.M.)

JERUSALEM (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces and police assaulted several Coptic Orthodox priests in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem, and forcefully detained one of them on Wednesday morning.

Prior to the assault, the Coptic Orthodox Church organized a peaceful protest near Deir al-Sultan Monastery, located on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, against an Israeli decision denying the church the right to conduct the needed renovation work inside the holy site.

It is noteworthy that the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem continues to conduct unauthorized renovation work for the Ethiopian Coptic Church section without the approval of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

Eyewitnesses said that Israeli soldiers and police officers surrounded the priests who were protesting, before assaulting and pushing them with excessive use of force, causing them several injuries.

Witnesses added that the Israeli police forcibly removed the priests and detained one of them, before allowing the Israeli municipality workers into the holy site.

The Islamic Christian Committee to Defend Jerusalem and Holy Sites condemned the assault on the Coptic Orthodox priests and denounced the intervention of Israeli authorities in the renovation works of the holy site.

The committee pointed out that it is not within its jurisdiction to intervene in issues of occupied East Jerusalem, considering the area is subjected to the rules of international humanitarian law (IHL).

The committee called upon the Egyptian government and the Christian world to immediately intervene to stop Israeli authorities from these attacks and not to enter the holy site under the pretext of restoration, since the Coptic Orthodox Church is the only authorized body to do so.

The committee also called on the world to stand by the Palestinian right to sovereignty over its land in the holy city and the rest of its other occupied territories, and to stop the measures carried out by the Israeli occupation in violation of the resolutions of international law and international humanitarian law.

The lighter side of Donald Trump (if there is one)

October 27, 2018, 1:38 pm

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A look at the Chump 

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Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are NOT anti-Semitic – Israelis do it all the time!

October 27, 2018, 5:57 pm

≫ Next: We Mourn the Jewish Victims of Fascism & White Supremacy at the Tree of Life Synagogue just as we mourn the Palestinian Victims of Snipers in Gaza

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What is the difference between Israelis who chant ‘Death to the Arabs’ and Nazis who shouted ‘Death to the Jews?’

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism states that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ could be anti-Semitic. But the strange thing is that anti-racist Israelis are the first to draw such comparisons. Are they also anti-Semitic under this dumb definition of anti-Semitism?

Perhaps Professor Zeev Sternhell who is emeritus head of the department of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the world’s leading experts on fascism is also anti-Semitic? Perhaps Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion or Daniel Yates, New Labour Head of Brighton and Hove Council, both of whom support the IHRA, can tell us?

But before they do I should tell them that Zeev Sternhell is a child survivor of the Holocaust. At the age of 7 he was smuggled out of the Przemyśl ghetto in Poland into Lwow. He was cared for by a Polish Catholic family and baptised.  He is one of the few Zionists who isn’t a racist which is perhaps why in September 2008 he was the victim of a pipe bomb attack by Zionist terrorists.

Sternhell poses a rhetorical question. How will future historians judge when it was that the Israeli state had devolved into a ‘true monstrosity for its non-Jewish inhabitants’. Sternhell is, as I said a Zionist who has illusions in a period when Israel was not a racist entity. Nonetheless it is to his credit that he now accepts that racism in Israel today is akin to that in pre-Holocaust Germany. I would go further.  All the evidence is that racism in Israel today is far higher than ever anti-Semitism was in Nazi Germany.

Ian Kershaw described how in Bavaria, the state-sponsored Kristallnacht pogrom on November 2^nd 1938 not only met with little sympathy but that it was ‘condemned deep into the ranks of the Party.’Just 5% of the population approved as opposed to 63% who displayed disgust and anger.  It was in rural Catholic Bavaria that the most vociferous condemnation of the pogrom was heard.  Kershaw notes,

another, more appealing, side of the popular reaction to the pogrom was its rejection on grounds of Christian compassion and common humanity.  Jewish eye-witness accounts abound with references to the kindness of ‘Aryan’ and ‘Christian’ neighbours who are anxious to point out the overwhelming rejection of the pogrom by the vast majority of the population. 

Jews in Munich ‘were lavish in their praise of the sympathetic response they encountered among non-Jewish people.’[Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp.257-277].   This despite living in a police state unprecedented in its viciousness. 

Isaac Herzog, Israeli Labour leader explains why he doesn't want a Palestinian Prime Minister of Israel

Compare this with the Israelis who set up armchairs and coffee machines on a hilltop in order that they could get a better view and cheer on the ongoing destruction taking place in Gaza. [‘Israelis gather on hillsides to watch and cheer as military drops bombs on Gaza, People drink, snack and pose for selfies against a background of explosions as Palestinian death toll mounts in ongoing offensive.’http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer-gaza-bombingHarriet Sharwood, The Guardian, 20.7.14].  

 The only effect of the holocaust has been to reinforce the self-righteousness and moral turpitude of Israel’s Jews and to enable them to justify their own vicious racism.

The Nazis had to try very hard to instil anti-Semitism in the German population. The Nazis came to power not because of but despite their anti-Semitism.

Sternhell speaks of ‘the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.’ Anyone familiar with Israeli society will know that the levels of racism in it are far higher than any equivalent Western society.

When we have, in the Labour Party, group like the Jewish Labour Movement going on about anti-Semitism whilst saying nothing about the horrific levels of racism in Israeli society, then we can accuse them of complicity. The JLM describe themselves as the ‘sister’party of the Israeli Labour Party yet not once have they called out the visceral racism of the ILP. Israel claims to be the nation state of Jews, all Jews, yet the JLM and  their supporters keep silent, apart from smearing their Jewish opponents.

As Sternhell quite correctly says, the Jewish Nation State Law which explicitly denies Israeli Palestinians any right to be considered part of the same nation as Israeli Jews, because there is no Israeli nationality, is no different in principle from the Nuremburg Laws which changed the status of German Jews from citizens and nationals into subjects.

Daniel Blatman whose book The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocidewon the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research in 2011is a Holocaust researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Blatman wrote an article earlier this year International Holocaust Remembrance Day: An Israeli Hypocrisy. Moshe Machover in Why Israel is a Racist State quotes Blatman as saying that “Deputy Speaker Bezalel Smotrich’s admiration for the biblical genocidaire Joshua bin Nun leads him to adopt values that resemble those of the German SS.”

According to Blatman, the blueprint of the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Bezalel Smotrich and Miki Zohar, a Likud MK, for the Palestinians, both inside and outside Israel, would be akin to Jews under the Nuremburg Laws.

As Sternhell observes, Smotrich and Zohar don’t wish to harm Palestinians, as long as they do what they are told of course, merely to ‘deprive them of their basic human rights, such as self-rule in their own state and freedom from oppression’.

The late Professor Amos Funkenstein, Head of the Faculty of History at Tel Aviv University when referring to the controversy over the refusal of soldiers to serve in the Occupied Territories, compared them to soldiers in the German army who refused to serve in concentration or extermination camps. [HOLOCAUST ANALOGIES - Repaying the Mortgage Return 2 March 1990] To those who asked how it was possible to compare the actions of Nazi soldiers with Israelis, Funkenstein replied,

“As a historian I know that every comparison is limited. On the other hand, without comparisons, no historiography is possible. Understanding a historical event is a kind of translation into the language of our time. If we would leave every phenomenon in its peculiarity, we could not make this translation. Every translation is an interpretation and every interpretation is also a comparison.”

It is not only anti-Zionists and anti-racists who make the comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany.  The racists also make the comparison.

The liberal left are often reticent about comparing Zionism to Nazism. Gilbert Achcar for example found it a ‘terrible comparison’ [Arabs and the Holocaust, pp.228. 234] and Shami Chakrabarti, in her report on racism in the Labour Party, argued that ‘it is always incendiary to compare the actions of Jewish people or institutions anywhere in the world to those of Hitler or the Nazis or to the perpetration of the Holocaust.’[The Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry, http://www.labour.org.uk/page/-/party-documents/ChakrabartiInquiry.pdf]  By this logic one should not compare the settlers of Hebron, who daub the walls of Palestinians with the slogan ‘Arabs to the gas chambers’ with the Nazis. [See for example Donald Macintyre, Breaking silence over the horrors of Hebron, 22.6.04. The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/breaking-silence-over-the-horrors-of-hebron-5355569.html]  Only Zionists should be allowed to make such comparisons.

If the Holocaust is to serve any purpose it is as a warning against the repetition of such horrors. Even Israel’s Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan recognised this when he said, at the 2016 Holocaust Remembrance Day, that

"If there's something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it's the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016."

When Israeli rabbis talk about the justified murder of children and infants in war time, as Rabbis Yitzhak Shapiro and Josef Elitzur did in Torat HaMelech, a 2011 book which was a guide to how Jews could legally kill non Jews, they are laying the basis for a future genocide.  As American journalist Max Blumenthall observed, Torat HaMelech is:

a virtual manual for Jewish extremist terror designed to justify the mass slaughter of civilians. And in that respect, it is not entirely different from the Israeli military’s Dahiya Doctrine, or Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin’s concept of “asymmetrical warfare.” The key difference seems to be the crude, almost childlike logic the book’s author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, marshals to justify the killing of non-Jewish civilians.

Nazism didn’t come from nowhere.  In Mein Kampf Hitler cites, with approval, the American practice of eugenics. Nazism wasn’t an aberration. It was supported by many of the West’s leaders, Churchill included, when it first took power. The destruction of the German Labour Movement met with approval by these people. It was only when Nazi Germany turned against British interests that the British ruling class opposed Hitler.

However the racism of the British Empire was not altogether different from the racism of the Nazis which is why the Colonial Office vetoed propaganda aimed at Africans which condemned the racism of the Nazis. [see Smyth, Rosaleen; Britain's African Colonies and British Propaganda during the Second World War, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 14,1 October 1985]

Isaac Herzog, Israeli Labour Party leader denies the party is 'Arab loving'

There can be little doubt that the edict of the Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, endorsed by dozens of other rabbis, to ban the renting of rooms or apartments by Jews to Arabs, bore a distinct resemblance to similar measures in pre-Holocaust Germany.  Safed Rabbi Boasts That anti-Arab Edict Worked

Or the mobs who in ‘liberal’ Tel Aviv chanted, during the attack on Gaza in 2014 that ‘‘There is no school tomorrow; there are no children left in Gaza’resembled similar mobs in Berlin.

Those who seek to deflect from these comparisons by raising the bogey of ‘anti-Semitism’ are actively colluding in Israel’s Nazi like racism. We only have to look at the Pew Research Centre’s Survey Israel’s Religiously Divided Society which found that a plurality of Israeli Jews want to physically deport Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

Nazi like? Well expulsion of the Jews was the programme of the Nazis until 1941.

Tony Greenstein

See also

Are there any limits to Corbyn’s ritual self-humiliation? Being a Leader means standing up to your opponents not appeasing them

Nazi Zionist Comparisons – Israel’s metaphor for a disturbed conscience

Professors Ofer Cassif & Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem Compare Israel to Nazi Germany

Israel’s Occupation Forces Have Learnt Well from the Nazis

In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism

Zeev Sternhell

19.01.2018 02:00

They don’t wish to physically harm Palestinians. They only wish to deprive them of their basic human rights, such as self-rule in their own state and freedom from oppression

Israeli border police arrest a Palestinian in the West Bank, December 22, 2017Nasser Shiyoukhi/AP

I frequently ask myself how a historian in 50 or 100 years will interpret our period. When, he will ask, did people in Israel start to realize that the state that was established in the War of Independence, on the ruins of European Jewry and at the cost of the blood of combatants some of whom were Holocaust survivors, had devolved into a true monstrosity for its non-Jewish inhabitants. When did some Israelis understand that their cruelty and ability to bully others, Palestiniansor Africans, began eroding the moral legitimacy of their existence as a sovereign entity?

The answer, that historian might say, was embedded in the actions of Knesset members such as Miki Zohar and Bezalel Smotrich and the bills proposed by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. The nation-state law, which looks like it was formulated by the worst of Europe’s ultra-nationalists, was only the beginning. Since the left did not protest against it in its Rothschild Boulevard demonstrations, it served as a first nail in the coffin of the old Israel, the one whose Declaration of Independence will remain as a museum showpiece. This archaeological relic will teach people what Israel could have become if its society hadn’t disintegrated from the moral devastation brought on by the occupation and apartheid in the territories.

The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people. The interviews Haaretz’s Ravit Hecht held with Smotrichand Zohar (December 3, 2016 and October 28, 2017) should be widely disseminated on all media outlets in Israel and throughout the Jewish world. In both of them we see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.

Israeli Labour Party leader Herzog welcomes Trump to power

Like every ideology, the Nazi race theory developed over the years. At first it only deprived Jews of their civil and human rights. It’s possible that without World War II the “Jewish problem” would have ended only with the “voluntary” expulsion of Jews from Reich lands. After all, most of Austria and Germany’s Jews made it out in time. It’s possible that this is the future facing Palestinians.

Indeed, Smotrich and Zohar don’t wish to physically harm Palestinians, on condition that they don’t rise against their Jewish masters. They only wish to deprive them of their basic human rights, such as self-rule in their own state and freedom from oppression, or equal rights in case the territories are officially annexed to Israel. For these two representatives of the Knesset majority, the Palestinians are doomed to remain under occupation forever. It’s likely that the Likud’s Central Committee also thinks this way. The reasoning is simple: The Arabs aren’t Jews, so they cannot demand ownership over any part of the land that was promised to the Jewish people.

According to the concepts of Smotrich, Zohar and Shaked, a Jew from Brooklyn who has never set foot in this country is the legitimate owner of this land, while a Palestinian whose family has lived here for generations is a stranger, living here only by the grace of the Jews. “A Palestinian,” Zohar tells Hecht, “has no right to national self-determination since he doesn’t own the land in this country. Out of decency I want him here as a resident, since he was born here and lives here – I won’t tell him to leave. I’m sorry to say this but they have one major disadvantage – they weren’t born as Jews.”

From this one may assume that even if they all converted, grew side-curls and studied Torah, it would not help. This is the situation with regard to Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers and their children, who are Israeli for all intents and purposes. This is how it was with the Nazis. Later comes apartheid, which could apply under certain circumstances to Arabs who are citizens of Israel. Most Israelis don’t seem worried.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day: An Israeli Hypocrisy

If a racism survey were held in Western countries like the one on anti-Semitism, Israel would be near the top of the list

We Mourn the Jewish Victims of Fascism & White Supremacy at the Tree of Life Synagogue just as we mourn the Palestinian Victims of Snipers in Gaza

October 28, 2018, 9:11 pm

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Robert Bowers pulled the trigger but it was Trump and Netanyahu who created the climate of hate which led to this massacre

In the wake of the worst anti-semitic massacre in US history we have the spectacle of Likud Party members in Israel JUSTIFYING the murders. 

“The murderer was fed up with people like you”

In a Facebook post, Yoav Eliasi, aka The Shadow , who I have covered recently, — a prominent Israeli hate rapper and Likud Party member in good standing — portrayed the massacre as a legitimate response to HIAC’s progressive agenda.

According to Eliasi, Bowers “was a man fed up with subversive progressive Jewish leftists injecting their sick agendas” into his country. Explicitly echoing the neo-Nazi’s manifesto, Eliasi added that “HIAS brings in infiltrators that destroy every country. The murderer was fed up with people like you. Jews like you brought the holocaust and now you’re causing antisemitism. Stop bringing in hate money from Soros.”

This is the same kind of Zionist anti-Semitism that led to collaboration in the 1930's between Zionists and anti-Semites, the Nazis included.I

 

Robert Bowers - the mass murderer

We feel the pain of the survivors of the massacre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania yesterday. This was the action of a cold and calculated neo-Nazi who sought to ‘take revenge’ on this community for their support of refugees.

Bower’s comments on social media site Gab make it clear that he held ‘the Jews’ and this community in particular, responsible for the influx of refugees into America.

His last message was ‘HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch our people get slaughtered. Screw your optics I’m going in.’

HIAS is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society which since 1881 has aided refugees. At first it supported Jewish refugees from the pogroms in Czarist Russia but today it helps all refugees. HIAS has put out a statement on what happened in Pittsburgh.

First Responders at the scene of the massacre

The congregants of the Tree of Life Synagogue were heavily involved in supporting HIAS’sprogrammes and for that they paid a very heavy price.

Bowers was a Christian anti-Semite who had on his web page the message ‘jews are the children of satan. (john 8:44) --- the lord jesus Christ is come in the flesh.” America is full of fundamentalist, bible-bashing Christians, most of whom combine their anti-Semitism with ardent Zionism, like Norway’s Andrei Brevikwho murdered over 70 people, mainly young socialists, seven years ago.

People gather for a vigil at Squirrel Hill

It is no accident that the worst anti-Semitic attack in American history, with 11 confirmed dead, should take place during the Presidency of Donald Trump. It sticks in the craw when Trump makes a statement (see video above) ‘It’s a terrible terrible thing what’s going on, with hate frankly in our country and all over the world.’ There is no person who bears a greater responsibility for that hate than Trump.

some of Trump's 'fine people', a comment that  Netanyahu found it difficult to criticise

In Charlottesville last summer, as America’s neo-Nazis and the alt-Right marched to the chant of ‘the Jews will not replace us’ Trump toldAmericans that there are ‘“very fine people on both sides”, thus equating anti-fascists with neo-Nazis.

Trump has made the demonizationof refugees the focus of the Republican’s election campaign for Congress next month. He has in particular targeted the march in Central America of a few thousand refugees hoping to gain entry into the United States.  Apparently there are no bigger threats facing a wealth country of 300 million people than these refugees. Trump’s description of himself as a ‘nationalist’ last week was rejected by Bowers who described him as a ‘globalist’ (a euphemism for ‘Jew’)

As Dana Milbank wrotein the wake of Pittsburgh, Trump’s election ‘began with genteel anti-Semitism, progressed to dog whistles and ended with a full-throated targeting of Jewish “globalists.’ Millbank detailed some of the examples of Trump’s anti-Semitism for anyone who believes that because his daughter married Jared Kushner, this somehow renders him immune from charges of anti-Semitism. Those who believe this nonsense should recall that many of leaders of Croatia’s puppet Nazi state, the Ustashe, were married to Jews but that didn’t prevent them setting up the only extermination camp not controlled by the Nazis, Jasenovac, in order to wipe out Serbs, Roma and Jews. Millbank’s examples of Trump’s anti-Semitism include:

Telling Jewish Republicans they wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money.”

Tweeting an image from an anti-Semitic message board with a Star of David atop a pile of cash.

Saying “I don’t have a message” for supporters who threatened anti-Semitic violence against a Jewish journalist, and Melania Trump saying the writer “provoked” the threats.

Branding his campaign with the “America First” slogan of the anti-Semitic pre-war movement.

Alleging that “blood suckers” and “a global power structure” including “international banks” are secretly plotting against ordinary Americans.

And, when urged by the Anti-Defamation League to stop using traditionally anti-Semitic tropes, repeated the tropes in an ad with images of prominent Jews, including George Soros.

Once in office, in addition to making common cause with the Nazis of Charlottesville, Trump stocked his administration with Stephen K. Bannon and other figures of the nationalist “alt-right;” … issued a Holocaust remembrance statement without mention of Jews; lamented the attempts to silence Alex Jones, who peddles anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; and, declaring himself a “nationalist,” increased verbal attacks on “globalists,” particularly Soros.

Millbank forgot to mention the appointment as an advisor of the openly neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka. Also worth reading is Millbank’s Anti-Semitism is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody.

There is no foreign leader who is closer to America’s bigot-in-chief than Benjamin Netanyahu. In January 2017 Netanyahu tweeted‘President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel's southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea.’

It is no surprise therefore that Netanyahu dispatchedthe most racist member of Israel’s cabinet, Naftali Bennett, leader of Jewish Home to Pittsburgh. He once remarkedthat ‘I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.’

In April, Netanyahu reached a deal with the UN High Commission for Refugees whereby for every refugee taken in by Europe another would stay in Israel. Bennett ledthe campaign against the deal saying that it "will turn Israel into a paradise for infiltrators."

Sending Naftali Bennett to comfort the Jews of America is like sending a member of the KKK as Ambassador to Barbados.

Trump’s partner in race hatred is Netanyahu, who has made it his business to demonise the Black African refugees who mostly live in South Tel Aviv. Their crime being Black and not Jewish. Netanyahu has done everything humanly possible to deport these refugees back to Africa knowing full well the danger they would be in. For Netanyahu and Israeli Labour Party leader Avi Gabbay their problem is that they threaten‘the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity."

What happened in Pittsburgh demonstrates graphically where the threat to Jews in the West comes from and it isn’t the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ of the Labour Party. It is the White Supremacist groups who make up America’s alt-Right and in Europe the parties of the far-Right who are part of the governments of Italy, Poland, Hungary, Austria and other East European states.

Sussex Friends of Israel use the massacre of liberal Jews in America to attack Jeremy Corbyn

It was therefore entirely predictable that the far-Right Sussex Friends of Israel, at least one of whose leading members has joined supporters of Tommy Robinson in demonstrations, should seek to make political capital out of the attack in Pittsburgh. When Jeremy Corbyn statedthat his thoughts were ‘with those killed or injured in this horrific act of antisemitic violence, and with their loved ones. We must stand together against hate and terror.’ The SFI responsewas to attack ‘the gross hypocrisy of someone calling an antisemitic, genocidal, terrorgroup - whose very charter calls for the killing of Jews - his ‘friends’ and then of offering his sympathies when they actually are!’Hamas, to whom SFI are referring, is none of these things.

Ha’aretz’s Chemi Shalev spokefor many when he wrote that ‘The victims of the horrific terror attack on the Tree of Life synagogue were murdered first and foremost because of their identification with the values that both leaders abhor.’

Shalev observed that when Trump said that the massacre might have been avoided if there had been armed guards, he was blaming the victims. Pulling no punches Shalev commented that ‘if the support of their own foul-mouthed, race-baiting president wasn’t enough of a burden, the hypocritical expressions of support emanating from Jerusalem...  add insult to the American-Jewish injury.’

Dan Stein, one of those murdered

The oldest victim was 97 year old Rose Mallinger. Details of some of the victims are printed by the Jewish Forward.

Perhaps the most telling remarks were made by Avi Gabbay, the leader of the Israeli Labour Party. His advicedemonstrates that Zionism is a surrender to anti-Semitism.

‘the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting should spur American Jews to move to Israel’ and‘come home.’ The report noted ‘While others focused on sending sympathy, the tone-deaf Gabbay called“upon the Jews of the United States to immigrate more and more to Israel, because this is their home.” 

Avi Gabbay, leader of the Israeli Labor Party, agrees with America's neo-Nazis that Jews do not belong there

There is nothing that Bowers and America’s neo-Nazis desire more than for American Jews to depart for Israel. As the founder of America’s alt-Right Richard Spencer has often declared, he is a White Zionist.  Gabbay demonstrated that when it comes to Jews in society, Zionism’s belief is the same as the anti-Semites – Jews do not belong. Our message should equally be clear. Jewish homes are where Jews reside.  Israel is not the home of world Jewry.

The irony is that although Robert Bowers recognized the Jews of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue as Jewish, the Israeli state does not. Conservative Jews are not considered Jewish by Israel’s Orthodox Rabbinate. Thus it is that Israel’s Chief Rabbi refused to call the Tree of Life a synagogue preferring to say that it was ‘a place with profound Jewish flavor’. In Israel Jews are the herrenvolk and you have to have precise and clear definitions of who is part of the master race. That is the role of Orthodox rabbis. Israel's Chief Rabbi Refuses to Call Pittsburgh Massacre Site a Synagogue Because It's non-Orthodox

Peter Beinart of The Forward The Special Kind Of Hate That Drove Pittsburgh Shooter — And Trumpasked

‘Why did Robert Bowers murder eleven people yesterday at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh? We’re unlikely to ever fully grasp his motives. But he was enraged, it appears, by the fact that synagogues were participating in a program run by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that dedicated special Shabbat services to the plight of refugees. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in,” Bowers wrote hours before his attack. In another post, he declared, “Open you Eyes! It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!”

Beinart observed that

‘Sheldon Adelson — who thinks all terrorists are Muslim— is Trump’s biggest financial backer. Mort Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America — who recently referred to “filthy Arabs” — is thrilled that Trump is trying to keep Muslims out of the United States. Last year, Republican Josh Mandel, who was running for the Senate in Ohio, retweeted a tweet declaring that, “I am so sick and tired of PC idiots worrying about offending Islam. I stand with Israel and my Judeo-Christian culture and I find Islam offensive.” Joel Pollak is senior-editor-at-large of Breitbart, which warns endlessly about the threat Americans face from depraved Muslim and Latino refugees.

Beinart argued that:

‘For Jews, the lesson of yesterday’s massacre is very simple and very old: Protecting the strangers among us is not charity. It is self-defense.’'… “Hate them, not us” is a losing strategy because once empowered, bigots widen their targets. For people who define America as a white Christian nation, Jews will never be white enough.’

As Beinart notes, 36 times in the Torah Jews are reminded to be like Abraham and Lot: To remember the heart of the stranger because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. It is not a lesson that Zionism and the State of Israel wish to hear when seeking greater racial purity.

The Jews of Pittsburgh died because they rejected Zionism’s values and that is how they should be remembered. I recommend the article below.

Tony Greenstein

What Has Trump Done To Us, America?

Jane EisnerOctober 27, 2018 

I have one daughter who is a freelance journalist and has reported from all sorts of dangerous places in the Middle East and Africa.

I have another daughter who is a nurse practitioner and right now is delivering health care to the Rohingya, whose plight is creating the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world.
And yet today, the daughter I am most worried about is the one in Brooklyn, who takes her children to synagogue on Shabbat as often as she can.

Because today, a synagogue on Shabbat was a deadly, terrifying place for a Jew to be.
What has happened to America?

We have become a nation in which Jews are increasingly targeted and attacked. The Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit of anti-Semitism found that anti-Semitic incidents rose 57 percent in 2017, the largest single year increase on record and the second highest reported since the ADL started to keep track in 1979.

No one is immune: At least one incident occurred in every state. In schools, community centers and cemeteries. And now, this year, in a synagogue.

What has happened to America?

We have become the nation of immigrants that is turning its back on immigrants, throwing them away from the border, separating families, locking up their children, and portraying them as satanic creatures ready to invade rather than ordinary people fleeing untenable circumstances.

So is it any wonder that Robert Bowers, the man arrested for shooting eleven people dead this morning at Etz Chaim synagogue in the heavily Jewish Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, was obsessed with HIAS, the legendary immigrant aid society that has helped Jews and non-Jews for more than a century?

“HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote on a social media post that has since been deleted. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

We have become a nation where even the sacred space of worship no longer offers protection against raging white men with guns. (And they are almost always white men with guns.) Etz Chaim in Pittsburgh will now join the ignoble list of religious sanctuaries splattered with blood. Southerland Springs, Texas in 2017 (26 people dead.) Antioch, Tennessee in 2017 (one dead, many wounded.) Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 (nine dead.) The list really can go on.

But very worst of all, we are a nation with a president who stokes this anger — against immigrants, against minorities, against anyone who disagrees with him at any moment — and then, when violence and death stain the landscape, blames the victims for not protecting themselves enough, as if that were the reason for the bloodshed.

It’s time for the Jewish community in all its many facets to confront the complicity of the man in the White House, and all who support him — with money, votes, political expertise and moral cover.
Because if you excuse the radical divisiveness spawned by this man, you are part of the problem. If you ignore his hateful tweets because you like his policies on Israel, you are part of the problem. If you silently cheer at the fascist-like rallies before only adoring audiences because you’ve got a few more dollars in your pocket, you are part of the problem.

If you want an America where every school, church, synagogue and mosque looks like a National Rifle Association convention, then you are part of the problem.

“These senseless acts of violence are not who we are as Americans,” Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf said this afternoon.

Oh, but it is. It is who we are as Americans. This is who we have chosen to lead us. Every day that he diminishes the grandeur and privilege of his office, he destroys what’s left of our fundamental values — and if we don’t object, he’ll simply do it again.

We need to confront this ugly aspect of the American character and defeat it. That is the only way to take the memory of those murdered today and turn it into a blessing.

Hamas condemns terror attack on Pittsburgh Synagogue

October 29, 2018, 9:00 am

≫ Next: Sussex Friends of Israel’s Attempt to Disrupt and Prevent a Palestine Solidarity Stall in Brighton Town Centre

≪ Previous: We Mourn the Jewish Victims of Fascism & White Supremacy at the Tree of Life Synagogue just as we mourn the Palestinian Victims of Snipers in Gaza

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As Zionists try to shift the blame for the murders away from White Supremacists and Trump America's Muslims raise over $100,000 for the victims

Yesterday Hamas, the  Islamic Resistance Movement in Gaza, condemnedthe murder of 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.  A synagogue that the Chief Rabbi and the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel won’t even recognise as Jewish and 11 worshippers who they also won’t recognise as Jewish. 

This is the same Hamas which the far-Right Sussex Friends of Israel called‘an antisemitic, genocidal, terror group - whose very charter calls for the killing of Jews’ in an attack on Jeremy Corbyn.

The far-Right so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism lumps in Muslims and supporters of the Palestinians - the only people they don't blame are those who encouraged Robert Bowers

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism went even further and employed the old Nazi tactic of rolling all your enemies into one in order to provide a single focus for their hate. The CAA blamedthe massacre on ‘far-right, far-left and Islamist extremists are stoking the flames of Jew-hatred, with too little done to stop them.” without, of course, stopping to think that maybe the alliance between Netanyahu and the Zionist movement with Trump and the alt-Right over the Israeli Embassy in Jerusalem and in their joint hatred of refugees may have played a part. The fact that Zionist billionaires like Sheldon Adelson, a close confidant of Netanyahu, supported Trump’s election campaign financially, should be a matter of deep shame.

Rabbi Blau, Israel's Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi refuses to recognise the Tree of Life as a synagogue or those murdered as Jews

Israeli Labour Party leader Avi Gabbay says that Jews in America should do what the neo-Nazis want them to do and leave

These miserable bigots, racists and Zionist fascists who purport to oppose anti-Semitism, in their anxiety to follow in the footsteps of Robert Bowers, Trump and his far-Right allies, completely ‘forgot’ to mention the appeal Muslims United for Pittsburgh Synagogue which to date has raised over $120,000.

Where Muslims spread peace and reach out, Israel and the Zionist movement can only preach hate. These Zionist propagandists are determined to continue to spread the seeds of hate and racism that fuelled Robert Bowers.

Prominent Zionist ‘Rabbi’ Shmueley Boteach, a friend of Trump and Sheldon Adelson, blamedthe ‘demonisation and deligitimisation of Israel’ but not of course his support for the very far-Right whose demonization of refugees inspired the murderer.

Of course none of this is as bad as yesterday’s statements from Yoav Eliasie, a hate rapper known as The Shadow who blamed the victims for their own murder, justifying the murderer.  That is truly shocking but it is a consequence of the warped and perverted Zionist idea that Jews, by remaining in the diaspora are responsible for their own persecution. They used to call it the ‘negation of the diaspora’ one of the founding principles of Zionism.

In a Facebook post Eliasi portrayedthe massacre as a legitimate response to HIAC’s progressive agenda.

According to Eliasi, Bowers

“was a man fed up with subversive progressive Jewish leftists injecting their sick agendas” into his country. Explicitly echoing the neo-Nazi’s manifesto, Eliasi added that “HIAS brings in infiltrators that destroy every country. The murderer was fed up with people like you. Jews like you brought the holocaust and now you’re causing antisemitism. Stop bringing in hate money from Soros.”

Hamas Statement Condemning the Murders at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue

28 October, 18

Member of the International Relations Bureau Basim Naim stated the following:

It is with deep regret and profound sadness that we received the news about the terrorist attack on a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh, which resulted in killing 11 innocent Jews and injuring six others.

As Palestinians who have been enduring the terrorism of the Israeli occupation, we are the most to realise what terrorism means and its destructive consequences.

On this sorrowful occasion, we would like to extend our sincerest condolences to the families of the victims, wishing the wounded a speedy recovery.

This aggressive act against 'worship places', which is highly condemned, highlights that terrorism has no religion nor ideology.

Dr. Basin Naim

Member of International Relations Bureau

Background information

A gunman opened fire on Saturday inside the 'Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue' in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during a service, killing 11 Jewish worshipers and injuring six others.

Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin has said that the Islamic Palestinian Resistance Movement condemns the killing of any human, whether he is a Muslim, Christian, Jew, or a follower of any doctrine.

Sussex Friends of Israel’s Attempt to Disrupt and Prevent a Palestine Solidarity Stall in Brighton Town Centre

October 29, 2018, 10:03 pm

≫ Next: We Demand that Palestine Solidarity Campaign Rejects the Resignation of Jenny Tonge as Patron

≪ Previous: Hamas condemns terror attack on Pittsburgh Synagogue

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Fascist Tactics as the Zionist Far-Right and Christian Fundamentalists Unite to Silence the Palestinian Voice

James - one of the main Christian Fundamentalists

James Dyer, a Christian Fundamentalist who was warned by the Police, who registered a racial incident, when he called me a kapo - I told him if I was a kapo he must be a Nazi!

In 2014, after two years of demonstrations, Israel’s Sodastream shop in British closed.  It had been an unhappy experience for the Zionists, a financial and public relations disaster.

Sussex Friends of Israel, which had been formed to defend the shop, was at a loss. Not knowing what to do, some of them relocated to Brighton’s New Road handing out leaflets persuading people to oppose ‘anti-Semitism’.

In fact it was mainly the Christian fundamentalists of SFI who continued the battle, replete with Israeli flags.  Most people who encountered these god botherers realised very quickly what they were about and either ignored them or, it would seem, gave them a hard time. Earlier this summer SFI had had enough in New Road. They complained that because the Police wouldn’t protect them from the public they would relocate to the Clocktower in order to harass us.

Brighton and Hove PSC has had a stall at Brighton’s Clocktower for nearly two decades. Every Saturday between 12 pm and 2 pm we hand out leaflets and mount exhibitions to demonstrate the plight and oppression of the Palestinians. This has been a source of continuing annoyance to SFI who have nothing positive to say about Israel and find it difficult to defend things like house demolitions, shooting unarmed demonstrators and gaoling children. For the Christian zombies all and every injustice if part of Gods plan to return the Jews to the holy land!

Blowing on whistles is their main form of activity as they have nothing positive to say

So once every 2 weeks for the past few weeks, SFI have turned up in the same place as the PSC stall, with the specific intention of trying to disrupt what we were doing. This has included standing directly in front of our stall or as was the case last weekend blowing whistles and making as much noise as possible to prevent conversations, coupled with a few individuals who tried to snatch leaflets from people. They have even employed someone who is mentally ill to harass people.

This is not unique to Brighton. It is clear that as part of Israel’s counter-BDS strategy, groups of Zionist activists nationally have decided to try and harass and disrupt Palestine solidarity activities. I have covered this in a number of posts and identified many of the individuals involved.

me on the megaphone which they tried to prevent on a couple of occasions!

Shame on Time Out for Supporting Apartheid - Inminds Activists Destroy Israeli 'Ice-Cream' Hasbara Stunt

Focus on Fascism - More News from Tommy Robinson’s Zionist Supporters & Reactions to My Revelations

EXCLUSIVE – Focus on Jonathan Hoffman’s Fascist Friends

EXCLUSIVE – Lifting the lid on Collaboration between the Far Right and Zionist Activists

The Zionist – Fascist Alliance was Consummated at the Al Quds Demonstration

Many of these same people have taken to picketing and trying to disrupt Palestinian solidarity meetings, led by one particular individual, Jonathan Hoffman, a former Vice-Chair of the Zionist Federation. These Zionist activists are on the far-Right, many of them involved in Tommy Robinson’s DFLA.

Brighton & Hove PSC has maintained a stall at Brighton’s Clocktower for nearly two decades.  In that time we have distributed thousands of leaflets, help in the education of many people concerning the world’s only Apartheid state – it has been almost completely incident free.

The Zionist call to arms

The clocktower - this is SFI's justification for relocating to the Clocktower

There is no doubt that with the level of provocation and deliberate disruption that SFI are already causing a public order problem will develop.  Indeed SFI are going out of their way to provoke incidents. SFI are not interested in persuading people of their cause because they don’t have one.  And as they have found out from New Road people are not interested in apologetics for racism and apartheid.  That is why they are intent in causing as much disruption and as many incidents as possible in order to prevent Brighton PSC holding its stall.

Although a couple of Police have been posted in the vicinity of late that is just a palliative.  It is therefore important that supporters of the Palestinian, anti-racists and anti-fascists and those on the Left in Brighton and Hove show their solidarity and support the right to organise and hold anti-racist/anti-imperialist stalls and activities without attempts by supporters of Apartheid to disrupt and close down free speech and the right of free assembly.

Sussex Friends of Israel were formed during the campaign to close Sodastream

One of the main Zionist activists in London is over the moon at the election of a fascist as Brazilian President

Tony Greenstein

We Demand that Palestine Solidarity Campaign Rejects the Resignation of Jenny Tonge as Patron

October 30, 2018, 11:09 pm

≫ Next: Remembering Uri Avnery - an Israeli giant

≪ Previous: Sussex Friends of Israel’s Attempt to Disrupt and Prevent a Palestine Solidarity Stall in Brighton Town Centre

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Cowardice Beyond the Call of Duty - PSC forces Jenny Tonge’s resignation and Briefs Against Her 

Yesterday I learnt from the Facebook page of the far-Right Sussex Friends of Israel that ‘Palestine Solidarity Campaign issued “deep concerns” about its patron Baroness Jenny Tonge, after she appeared to blame Israel for a resurgence in antisemitism in the wake of the deadly Pittsburgh massacre.’

In Jewish News I learnt that ‘Palestine Solidarity Campaign told Jewish Newsit has “contacted Jenny Tonge to express our deep concerns at her post and is in the process of considering any further steps.” What did Jenny say that the Zionists reacted so furiously to and which PSC found impossible to defend?

Jenny Tonge said, in response to the Pittsburgh massacre:

“Absolutely appalling and a criminal act, but does it ever occur to Bibi and the present Israeli government that it’s actions against Palestinians may be reigniting anti Semitism? I suppose someone will say that it is anti Semitic to say so?”

The offending remarks

Jenny was attacked by Eric Pickles, former Chair of Conservative Friends of Israel and the nearest thing to a rattle snake in human form. Pickles ‘called on the minister to condemn the “the words of Baroness Tonge in suggesting that the murders in Pittsburgh were caused by the actions of the Israeli government”. It wouldapparently ‘cause great pain in Pittsburgh and falls foul of the International Holocaust definition of anti-Semitism.”I doubt if anyone in Pittsburgh was even aware of the comments of the noble Baroness but of course that wasn’t the point of Pickle’s attack.

Open Letter to Ben Sofa, Secretary of Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Pickles is the same foul creature who defended the Tory’s alliance in the European parliament with the European Conservatives and Reformists.  A group that contains at least 3 anti-Semitic parties and which was chaired by Michal Kaminski, who used to belongto the anti-Semitic and fascist National Revival before founding the mainstream anti-Semitic Polish Law & Justice Party. The ECR also included Robert Zile of the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom Party/LNNK. 

Unlike PSC America's Liberal Zionist The Forward isn't afraid to draw the connections between the Pittsburgh murderer, Trump and Netanyahu

Zile has a quaint habit of marching with the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS every March, something which Pickles had no problem defending. As Jonathan Freedland observedPickles

‘offered an appalling defence, telling the BBC last month that the Latvian Waffen-SS were only conscripts fighting for their country, and to say otherwise was a Soviet smear. Again, this misses the fact that a substantial minority of the Latvian Waffen-SS were eager volunteers, including veterans of pro-Nazi death squads who had already taken part in the first phase of the Holocaust – and that should be enough to decide that those who march in celebration of men who fought with Hitler, and against Britain and its allies, are beyond the pale. Once no self-respecting politician would have gone near people such as Kaminski

Pickles who sees nothing wrong with forming an alliance with Kaminski, who excused the Jedwabne massacre of Jews in 1941 (up to 1600 were herded into a barn which was then set alight) on the grounds that they had collaborated with the Soviet Union and a Latvian MEP who marches with formers members of the SS, was however concerned about “the words of Baroness Tonge in suggesting that the murders in Pittsburgh were caused by the actions of the Israeli government”. Apparently it “will cause great pain in Pittsburgh and falls foul of the International Holocaust definition of anti-Semitism.”

Netanyahu makes it clear that his and Trump's refugee policies are one and the same

Well it may well fall foul of the IHRA because that is the sole purpose of the IHRA, to conflate anti-Zionist comments with anti-Semitism.  Jenny herself posted on her  Facebook page that:

‘PSC are very worried about the furore surrounding my remarks following Pittsburgh and I have resigned to save them embarrassment!!! Sad day.

Let us look at the comments which have so aroused the Zionist ire and which PSC is too cowardly to defend.  First she condemned without hesitation the murders in Pittsburgh.  No one bar a malevolent mischief maker could therefore accuse her of anti-Semitism.

She then asked whether it has ever occurred to Netanyahu and the Israeli government that their actions may be reigniting anti-Semitism.  That is a fair question.  The only possible objection to the comment is not that it is wrong but that the actions of the particular individual, Robert Bowers, were those of a more traditional neo-Nazi who believed that Jews were responsible for the destruction of the white race by introducing into them non-white refugees.

What is though clear is that Bowers was motivated by the racist atmosphere that has been stirred up to fever pitch by Donald Trump against refugees, in particular the refugee caravan. It can hardly have escaped even PSC’s notice that Netanyahu has been to the forefront of this campaign.  Netanyahu has done his best to deport 40,000 Black African refugees because they are neither Jewish or White.  He has even tweeted in support of Trump’s plan to build a wall on the border with Mexico. Clearly Netanyahu has contributed to this anti-refugee campaign of Trump with his own, not inconsiderable efforts.

Jenny’s observation that Israel’s attacks against Palestinians are stirring up anti-Semitism in the West is a fact.  Zionist bodies go out of their way to say that Jews, all Jews, support Israel’s attacks against the Palestinians.  Only recently the Board of Deputies defendedIsrael’s shooting of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza. Is it surprising that when the self-proclaimed body that represents British Jews supports Israel’s murderous actions in Gaza that some people will then blame and even attack British Jews?

However just as racists like Pickles reject the idea of connecting what Israel does with anti-Semitism in the West, so Israel’s Education Minister Naftali Bennett was reported in The Times of Israel as sayingthat connecting Trump to the attack is wrong because Trump has been a good friend to Israel and has strongly condemned anti-Semitism, in particular he had moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

Bennett defendedTrump’s anti-Semitism on the grounds that he is pro-Israel. This is the standard Zionist defence of anti-Semites. 

“Using the horrible anti-Semitic massacre to attack the president is unfair, it’s wrong. He condemned anti-Semitism in the strongest possible words. Clearly President Trump is a great friend of Israel and of the Jews.’

There is however a very clear connection between Trump and anti-Semitism (and therefore Netanyahu). After the election of Trump Dana Millbank of the Washington Post wrote Anti-Semitism is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody. In it Dana described how Trump’s election campaign had deliberately used anti-Semitism as a means of appealing to the White Supremacist vote.

In the wake of the Pittsburgh massacre Dana Milbank wrotedescribing how Trump’s election ‘began with genteel anti-Semitism, progressed to dog whistles and ended with a full-throated targeting of Jewish “globalists.’ Millbank gave us a few examples:

Telling Jewish Republicans they wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money.”

Tweeting an imagefrom an anti-Semitic message board with a Star of David atop a pile of cash.

Saying “I don’t have a message” for supporters who threatened anti-Semitic violence against a Jewish journalist, and Melania Trump saying the writer “provoked” the threats.

Branding his campaign with the “America First” slogan of the anti-Semitic pre-war movement.

Allegingthat “blood suckers” and “a global power structure” including “international banks” are secretly plotting against ordinary Americans.

And, when urged by the Anti-Defamation Leagueto stop using traditionally anti-Semitic tropes, repeated the tropes in an ad with images of prominent Jews, including George Soros.

Once in office, in addition to making common cause with the Nazis of Charlottesville, Trump stocked his administration with people like Stephen Bannon and other figures of the nationalist “alt-right;”, issued a Holocaust remembrance statement without mention of Jews; and lamented the attempts to silenceAlex Jones, who peddles anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; declaring himself a “nationalist,” as well as increasing verbal attacks on “globalists,” particularly Soros. This was in addition to appointing as an advisor the openly neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka.

PSC shamefully leaked against its own patron

The attacks on Jenny Tonge are wholly hypocritical and for PSC Executive and its Secretary Ben Sofa, to have bowed before the tide of Zionist hypocrisy, beggars belief. If PSC Executive don’t retract and either refuse to accept Jenny’s resignation or alternatively invite her to reconsider then I shall move a motion of censure on PSC Executive at the forthcoming AGM.

It would appear from the latest issue of Jewish News that PSC have accepted Jenny’s resignation and they also quote me as saying ‘“I suggest that you retract your resignation as nothing you said was in the least bit wrong. I am at present writing them a letter and now I know this will adjust it accordingly. Please retract your resignation“.

See also the excellent Mondoweiss article The Israeli government is exploiting the Pittsburgh murders to try to demonize Palestine solidarity

Remembering Uri Avnery - an Israeli giant

October 31, 2018, 11:19 pm

≫ Next: The Talk about a famous Black journalist that the Guardian and Nick Cohen Tried to Ban

≪ Previous: We Demand that Palestine Solidarity Campaign Rejects the Resignation of Jenny Tonge as Patron

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Uri Avnery was the last Zionist who genuinely supported equality

Uri Avnery marching with Gush Shalom peace activists, 2002. Photograph: Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images

Uri Avnery, who died on 20^th August aged 94 was a remarkable political activist.  Avnery fought in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 (or the Nakba) and he defended that war as a defensive war. Avnery became a life long campaigner for peace as well as a political maverick. He edited the magazine Haolem Hazeh for close on 40 years and when it became the target of Israeli Labour’s state repression he stood for and was elected to serve in the Knesset. 

Uri Avnery in 1980, working as a journalist and publisher of the magazine HaOlam HaZeh. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

Haolem Hazeh was a left-wing muck racking journal that attracted the ire of the Israeli Labour establishment.  It printed the story of how the Iraqi Jewish community, the worlds oldest Jewish community was forced out of the country, not by anti-Semitism but by Zionist agents planting and throwing bombs into Jewish cafes and even synagogues in order to simulate the appearance of anti-Semitism.  It took the side of Israel’s Oriental/ Misrahi Jews against the Ashkenazi Labour Establishment which saw the Iraqi and other Middle Eastern Jewish communities as providing the Jewish working class of Israel, once they had been de Arabised. 

It is arguable whether or not Avnery was a Zionist since he believed in a Jewish or Hebrew State alongside a Palestinian state but one inclusive of its Arab inhabitants.  He was part of the Canaanite group who believed in cutting Israel off from  the Jewish diaspora and becoming an Israeli nation. 

What Uri didn’t or refused to understand was that Zionism was a settler colonial state and that Zionism could not simply be abandoned once the Israeli state had been created. The character of the Jewish state was indelibly fixed by the manner of its birth.  It was condemned to be a bastard state. Zionism inevitably meant the displacement of the Palestinians from their land prior because of the need to secure a Jewish majority in a land where Palestinians were the majority, even in the part allocated by the UN to a Jewish state. This ensured that process of colonisation and discrimination would continue after 1948. A Jewish state also meant that Arabs would be consigned to the margins, an after thought.

Avnery, pictured in 2011, ‘was badly beaten and stabbed by Israeli fascists’ (Getty)

Yet despite this Uri Avnery was one of the very few Zionist supporters who genuinely believed in the 2 State Solution.  Most of those who profess support for 2 states do so because, like the Israeli Labour Party, they want segregation between Jew and Arab whilst seeking to ensure that Israel is not officially an apartheid state, as it is now, ruling over millions of people who haven’t even the most minimal democratic or civil rights.  Avneri sincerely condemned the occupation and the harsh military regime which ruled over the Palestinians whereas the hypocrites of the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel, who say they support two states in fact support the military occupation, the checkpoints, arbitrary imprisonment, torture and all the other practices that go along with military rule.

I had my disagreements with Uri in particular his opposition to BDS in for example Uri Avnery – The Muddle Headed Zionist Opposes Boycott. InVeteran Israeli Peacenick Clings to Zionist Delusions I posted an article by Jonathan Cook which criticised Avnery’s argument that the position of Israel’s Arab population was akin to the discrimination against national minorities in Europe. I also reprinted in Uri Avnery - Supporter of 'Peace' and the Palestinian Police Statelet an article by Israeli anti-Zionist Tikva Honig Parnass Support of the Israeli Peace Camp for the Autocratic Palestinian Regimewhich detailed one of the problems of Avnery’s two state position.  It meant support for the Palestinian Authority, which is a nasty little police statelet, the subcontractor for Israel’s military occupation.

However when Israel killed 9 people on the Marva Marmara, a ship trying to break the blockade of Gaza, I had no hesitation in reprinting Uri’s excellent articleWho is Afraid of a real Inquiry?.

Uri Avnery was a maverick, but a sincere maverick and also a brilliant journalist with a flare for writing.  I can remember discussing with Moshe Machover whether or not it would be fair to classify Uri as a Zionist or not. I don’t think we ever decided. One thing is for certain. Uri was one of the very few Zionists, if that is what he was, who genuinely and sincerely believed in equality between Jew and Palestinian and who was sincere in his desire for a fully independent Palestinian state and an end to the Occupation.

That was why Uri supported indeed initiated a Boycott of Settlement Produce but not of Israeli goods.

Uri wrote regularly for some 25 years a regular Friday article. Appropriately enough his last article entitled Who the Hell Are We?, written in the aftermath of the passage of Netanyahu’s Jewish Nation State Law, posed the question that has dogged the Israeli state - what is the identity and nationality of those who inhabit that State. 

Uri’s conclusion was that there is a Hebrew not a Jewish people in Israel which encompasses the Arab inhabitants of the State.  In other words Uri was rejecting the idea that Israel should be a state of only its Jewish inhabitants and the even more absurd idea that the Jews of Israel are part of a wider Jewish nation, encompassing Jews throughout the world.

Uri Avnery, the Israeli optimist who played chess with Yasser Arafat, has died – he was one of my few Middle East heroes

Robert Fisk's appreciation recalls the time he, Fisk, had walked across the bodies of up to 2,000 Palestinians, mainly women and young children, who had been slaughtered in Beirut by Israel’s fascist Phalangist allies under the watchful eyes of Israeli troops.  Not only had Israel’s military kindly lit up the sky with flares in order that the Phalange could see who they were killing but survivors who fled to the perimeter of the camp were turned back into the hell of the camps.  Fisk asked Avnery how the survivors of the Holocaust and their children could commit such an atrocity:

 “I will tell you something about the Holocaust. It would be nice to believe that people who have undergone suffering have been purified by suffering. But it’s the opposite, it makes them worse. It corrupts. There is something in suffering that creates a kind of egoism. Herzog [the Israeli president at the time] was speaking at the site of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen but he spoke only about the Jews. How could he not mention that others – many others – had suffered there? Sick people, when they are in pain, cannot speak about anyone but themselves. And when such monstrous things have happened to your people, you feel nothing can be compared to it. You get a moral ‘power of attorney’, a permit to do anything you want – because nothing can compare to what has happened to us. This is a moral immunity which is very clearly felt in Israel. Everyone is convinced that the IDF is more humane than any other army. ‘Purity of arms’ was the slogan of the Haganah army in ’48. But it never was true at all.”

I shall certainly miss his regular Friday article which can be found here! Below are two appreciations of Uri and I also recommend Jonathan Steele’s excellent obituary.

As Diana Buttu, a former advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team observed‘His (Uri’s) death, in a lot of ways, marks the end of the two-state solution – he was the last activist I know of that was really calling for it.”

Tony Greenstein 

The Israeli peace activist who crossed enemy lines and shaped generations

Adam Keller, who spent 50 years working alongside Uri Avnery, remembers the man who hoped for a warm embrace between an Israeli and a Palestinian president.

By Adam Keller

Uri Avnery (Yossi Gurvitz)

How to sum up in a few words 50 years of political partnership, which was also an intimate friendship, with the person who, I believe, had the most influence on me?

The starting point: summer of 1969. A 14-year-old from Tel Aviv, during the summer between elementary school and high school, I notice an ad in HaOlam HaZeh newspaper asking for volunteers at the election headquarters of the “HaOlam Hazeh – Koah Hadash” (“New Power”) party. I went. In a small basement office on Glickson Street, I found three teenagers folding propaganda flyers into envelopes. To this day, the smell of fresh print takes me back to this very moment. Two hours later, we heard a commotion outside. Member of Knesset Uri Avnery, the man whose articles brought us to this office in the first place, walked in. He was returning from an election campaign in Rishon LeZion. He exchanged a few words with the volunteers, thanked us for our help, and went into a meeting room with his aides.

At that point, it was not Uri Avnery’s opinions on the Palestinian issue that motivated me to volunteer for the campaign. My own opinions on the matter were not fully formed yet. Only two years prior, in June of 1967, I had shared with many others in celebrating the fact that Israel expanded into “new territories.” I would not have even imagined that I would eventually dedicate most of my life to trying to get Israel out of those territories. I was attracted to Uri Avnery’s party primarily because it was a young, fresh political party that challenged the old, rotten establishment parties, and because it was opposed to religious coercion, and advocated for separation of religion and state, public transportation on Shabbat, and civil marriage.

A few weeks after I began volunteering, I left a note on Uri’s desk with a few questions: can we really make peace with the Arabs? Should we give back all the territories Israel occupied, or only some? And what will happen with the settlers? (The settler population at the time was a tiny fraction of what it is today.) A week later, I received a letter in the mail – three pages of detailed answers to each one of my 10 questions. I still have that letter. I have no doubt that Uri wrote it himself – his writing style seeps out of every word. He took the time and energy, in the middle of running a political campaign, to provide thorough answers to the questions of a 14-year-old teenager. I think it turned out to be a profitable investment.

The end point: Friday, August 3, 2018. A years-long political partner of Uri Avnery, at 63 years old, I receive his weekly column, as I do every Friday. In this article, he wrote about the Jewish Nation-State Law and Israel’s national identity, and whether it was Jewish or Israeli (he, of course, strongly advocated for an Israeli identity). As I had done many times before, I wrote him an email commenting on the substance of the article, raising some fundamental objections. He suggested we discuss them further next time we meet. I asked for his opinion on the protest against the Nation-State Law, scheduled for the following day by the Druze community. He said he was convinced that the demonstration would not focus on the Druze’s exclusive standing in Israeli society, or the unique bundle of rights they get for serving in the military, but that it will tackle the fundamental principle of equality for all citizens.

Tens of thousands of protesters joined the Druze community in rejecting the Jewish Nation-State Law at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv on August 5, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

The last which I will ever hear from him was a one-line message on my computer screen: “I am going to the Druze protest tomorrow.” I assume that he did read what I had written him, and that he woke up the next day with the intention of participating in the protest. In the evening, when I was standing amidst the large crowd that amassed in Rabin Square, I assumed he was standing somewhere around. I rang his phone twice but there was no reply, chalking it up to bad reception (which is common during mass rallies when very many people use their mobile phones all at once). In retrospect I know that by then he had already been admitted to an emergency room at Ichilov Hospital, never to regain his consciousness. It was the activists who planned to give him a ride to the demonstration who had found him lying on the floor of his apartment.

What filled the 50 years between the start and end points? The HaOlam Hazeh – Koah Hadash party, which merged into Peace and Equality for Israel, a political party known as Shelli in Hebrew; the Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, which managed meetings with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and became a faction of Shelli; the Progressive List for Peace, which we joined after Shelli disintegrated; and then Gush Shalom. So many meetings, marches, protests and conversations. So many memories.

Standing side by side, holding posters at a protest to prevent the closure of Raymonda Tawil’s news agency in East Jerusalem. The photo that Avnery’s wife, Rachel, took of that demonstration is still up on the wall of the room I am writing these very words in. A conversation with Avnery the day that HaOlam Hazeh, which he edited for 40 years, officially shut down. “I know this is a difficult day for you,” I said. He answered: “The paper was a tool, serving a purpose. We shall find other tools.”

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat being interviewed by Uri Avnery in west Beirut. (Photo by Anat Saragusti, courtesy of Uri Avnery)

It is early 1983. Uri Avnery, Matti Peled and Yaakov Arnon, known us the “Three Muskateers,” come back from a meeting with Yasser Arafat in Tunisia. As soon as he lands at the airport, he hands me photos of the meeting, and I bounce from one newsroom to another across Tel Aviv to distribute them in person. I then take a shared taxi to Jerusalem where Ziad Abu Zayyad, editor of the Palestinian Al-Fajr (“The Dawn”) newspaper, waited for me.

A bit later in 1983, the radio announcing the assassination of Issam Sartawi, a PLO member who often met with Avnery and was a close friend to him, and my phone call to Uri informing him of the sad news. The frustrating, endless phone calls in the couple of days that followed proved to us that it was impossible to rent a hall in Tel Aviv to commemorate a PLO man – even one who advocated for peace with Israel and was killed for it.

December 1992. Prime Minister Rabin, who had not yet signed the Oslo Accords and had not yet become a hero of peace, expels more than four hundred Palestinian activists to Lebanon, and we put up a protest tent in front of the Prime Minister’s Office. It is a cold Jerusalem winter, and it is snowing, but inside the tent that was donated by Bedouins from the Negev, it feels warm and cozy. Uri, Rachel, myself and my wife Beate join other activists in a long conversation with Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the northern branch of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, on Judaism and Islam, and how religion and politics converge and clash.

In 1997, in the middle of a protest in front of Har Homa – Netanyahu’s flagship settlement – Uri’s stomach wound, which he had been carrying since the war in 1948, breaks open. A Palestinian ambulance clears him to Al-Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem; we are all anxious. Rachel tells me, “even though I do not believe in God, I am praying.” But Uri recovers and lives on for 21 more years of intensive political activity.

May 2003, the Muqata’a (presidential compound) in Ramallah. That afternoon, there was a suicide bombing in Rishon LeZion, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon drops a hint that he might send an elite IDF unit to “handle” Yasser Arafat that night. We are among 15 Israeli activists who go to Ramallah to serve as human shields. We call the media and tell them that “for the Prime Minister’s information, there are Israeli citizens sitting outside of Arafat’s door!”

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. president Bill Clinton, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat at the signing of the Oslo Accord (photo: Vince Musi / The White House)

Arafat shows Uri his gun and says, “if they come, I have a bullet in here for myself.” We spend an entire night at Arafat’s door, having conversations with young Palestinian guards in a mix of Arabic, Hebrew, and English, paying attention to every sound. Then, it is dawn, and we understand that we made it through the night safely, and that the soldiers will not be coming.

Another long, relaxed conversation when we stopped to eat something on our way back from a Progressive List meeting in Nazareth: “The Crusaders were here before us, they came from Europe and established here a country that lasted 200 years. Not all of them were religious fanatics. Among them were people who spoke Arabic and had Muslim friends. But they were never able to achieve peace with their neighbors or adapt to this region. They had temporary agreements and ceasefires, but were not able to gain real peace. Acre was their ‘Tel Aviv,’ and when it fell, the last Crusaders were thrown into the sea – literally. Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.”

“If I ever get the chance to serve as a minister, I would want to be education minister. That is the most important portfolio in the cabinet. The defense minister may be able to send soldiers to die in war, but the education minister can shape children’s consciousness. The policies of today’s education minister will still bear manifest results in 50 years, when today’s children become grandparents and talk to their own grandchildren. If I were the minister, the first thing I would do is remove the [biblical] Book of Joshua from the curriculum. That book advocates genocide, plain and simple. It is also a historical fiction – the events it describes never happened. Rachel was a teacher for 40 years, and every year she succeeded in avoiding teaching this trash.”

Rachel accompanied him everywhere, an active partner to everything he did, editing his articles and dealing with the all the logistics of organizing protests. We all knew she was a hepatitis B carrier, a time bomb that might explode at any minute. And when it finally did, Uri spent six months with her in the hospital, day and night. He almost had disappeared from political life. One day, I happened to bump into him in the hallway of Ichilov Hospital as he was pushing her in a wheelchair, from one checkup to another.

In her final weeks, someone told Uri of an experimental treatment that could save Rachel’s life. Although he knew the chances were slim, Uri spent large sums of money to purchase the medication in America and have it flown to Ben Gurion Airport, and from there, transported directly to the hospital. When she passed away, Uri asked that nobody contact him for three days, and he completely disengaged from the world. Once those three days were over, he went back to his routine of protests and political commentary ­– or so it seemed.

How to finish off this article? I will go back to 1969, to an article by Uri which I read under the table during a very boring class in eighth grade. I still remember it, almost word for word; it was a futuristic article that attempted to imagine what the country would look like in 1990. The page was split into two parallel columns, representing two parallel futures. In one of the futures, Independence Day in 1990 is marked by a tremendous manifestation of military power, with new tanks on display in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Moshe Dayan congratulates IDF soldiers who are on alert in the Lebanon Valley and the Land of Goshen near the Nile, and declares: “We shall never give up the city of Be’erot (formerly Beirut), this is our ancestral homeland!”

In the second future, on Independence Day in 1990, festive receptions are being held at Israeli embassies across the Arab world, but the most moving photo was captured in Jerusalem, of a warm embrace between Israeli President Moshe Dayan and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

Adam Keller is an Israeli peace activist who was among the founders of Gush Shalom. This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

Veteran left-wing journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery dies at 94

Avnery, who helped expose some of the darkest chapters in Israeli history and was a fervent opponent of the occupation, inspired generations of Israeli journalists.

By +972 Magazine Staff

Uri Avnery (left) marches alongside his wife Rachel during a rally against the occupation of the West Bank and the siege on Gaza. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Uri Avnery, one of Israel’s most prominent journalists and a seminal peace activist who was among the first Israelis to advocate for a sovereign Palestinian state, died in Tel Aviv on Monday morning. He was 94 years old.

Born Helmut Ostermann to a bourgeois family in Beckum, Germany in 1923, Avnery’s family moved to Palestine in 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power. They settled in Tel Aviv. Just a few years after their arrival, Avnery joined the Irgun, the pre-state right-wing Zionist militia. Too young to take part in its militant actions, which included attacks against British soldiers and Arab civilians, Avnery distributed leaflets and edited the Revisionist journal Ba-Ma’avak (“In the Struggle”).

He left the Irgun in 1942, because he was uncomfortable with its harsh anti-Arab position, and joined the Givati Brigade of the Haganah during the 1948 War. During the war he wrote dispatches from the field for Haaretz newspaper, which he later compiled into a book. Avnery was wounded twice — the second time, toward the end of the war, seriously; he spent the last months of his army service convalescing and was discharged in the summer of 1949.

Avnery initially supported the idea of one state, in which a single nation would arise as a union of Arabs and Hebrews — the latter a term he preferred over Jews, since he advocated a state for the Hebrew nation rather than the Jewish people.

During the mid-1960s, Avnery believed that the national Hebrew movement was a natural ally of the Arab nation; he advocated cooperation between the two, under a joint name. By the end of the June 1967 war, however, Avnery changed his views: He advocated the establishment of a Hebrew state alongside an Arab one, as per the 1947 UN Partition Plan.

In 1950 Avnery, together with journalist Shalom Cohen, bought the failing HaOlam HaZeh (“This World”) newspaper in 1950. As editor-in-chief, Avnery turned the paper into a dissident and anti-establishment tabloid that mixed exposés on the corruption of the ruling Mapai government (Ben Gurion’s party, which dominated Israeli politics from 1948 until 1977) with gossip pieces and photographs of nude women.

Commonly derided by Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Ben Gurion, the paper’s editorial position was anti-militarist. It published investigative reports that exposed the government’s racist and discriminatory policies against Mizrahi Jews and other ethnic minorities, opposed the military rule that was imposed on Israel’s Arab citizens from 1948-1966, and was the first to publicize the Yemenite Children Affair.

During the years he was editor of HaOlam HaZeh, Avnery was victim of numerous physical attacks. One ended with both his arms broken. In 1975, he was seriously wounded after an assailant stabbed him on his own doorstep.

Uri Avnery, left, with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat during a meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah, 2002. Photograph: Brennan Linsley/AP

The Shin Bet, Israel’s General Security Service, saw in HaOlam HaZeh a serious threat to the state and listed Avnery as the top enemy of the government. The newspaper’s office was bombed several times, with a 1972 arson attack destroying its entire archives. At one point, the Shin Bet even published its own tabloid, Rimon, in order to discredit HaOlam HaZeh and put it out of business. Rimon would operate for only three years before shutting down.

Avnery decided to enter politics in 1965, after the Knesset passed an anti-defamation law that sought to clamp down on HaOlam HaZeh. He founded the left-wing movement Koah Hadash (New Power). After his election to the Knesset in 1969, Avnery dedicated his parliamentary activities to promoting peace with Israel’s neighbors, fighting against religious coercion by the ultra-Orthodox, and championing civil liberties. He would return to the Knesset in 1979 with the dovish Sheli party, and in 1981 was the first MK to hold up the Palestinian flag alongside the Israeli one in the Knesset plenum.

In 1982, at the height of the Israeli army’s siege on Beirut, Avnery and a group of Israeli journalists, including Anat Saragusti, met with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat in the city — one of the first times Israelis met with the Palestinian leader (Charlie Bitton and Tawfik Toubi, both members of Knesset from Israel’s communist party, met with Arafat and the PLO leadership two years prior). The meeting came almost a decade after Avnery made contact with one of Arafat’s envoys. Upon his return from Lebanon, members of the Israeli government called for Avnery to be tried for high treason. Avnery would continue to meet with Arafat in subsequent years, including in 1994, after the Palestinian leader arrived in the occupied territories under the Oslo Accords.

Uri Avnery (center) sits between Arab MK Ahmad Tibi (L), and Likud MK Zeev Elkin (R) in the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, February 16, 2014. (Flash90)

Avnery would eventually split off from Sheli with a group of Arab and left-wing movements to form the Progressive List for Peace, which called for equality for Israel’s Palestinian citizens and an end to the occupation. In 1993, feeling that Israeli peace groups did not take a strong enough stance against the government’s repressive measures — which included the 1992 expulsionof 415 Hamas members from the occupied territories —  Avnery formed the peace group Gush Shalom. He remained the head of the movement, helping organize demonstrations against the occupation and the siege on Gaza and publishing a weekly column until his death.

From the beginning of his journalism career, mainstream Israeli opinion held that Avnery’s writing was subversive and anti-Israel. In his later years he was the subject of controversy after he published articles attacking Russian immigrants and Mizrahi Jews, accusing them of responsibility for Israel’s rightward shift.

Uri Avnery’s wife Rachel died in 2011. They were married for 58 years and chose not to have children, so that they could dedicate their lives to political struggle.

The Talk about a famous Black journalist that the Guardian and Nick Cohen Tried to Ban

November 1, 2018, 11:48 am

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Kerry Ann-Mendoza of the CanaryDefies the NUJ to Give the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture 2018

Kerry and Tony G!

Last Tuesday I attended the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture at the Sands Film Studios in Rotherhithe, London. This was the 11^th annual lecture  and the most controversial. Claudia Jones, who died at the early age of 49, was a Black journalist, communist and activist who was deported in December 1955 from the United States as part of the McCarthyite witch-hunt, having been gaoled four times for ‘UnAmerican activities’.

Claudia Jones

The audience at the Sands Film Studios to hear Kerry Ann Mendoza

Claudia was one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival and when she died she was buried to the left of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery.

The lecture was due to have been given at the Guardian/Observer offices on October 11^th by Kerry Ann-Mendoza, editor of the Canary, but a campaignby White journalists, led by Islamaphobe-in-chief Nick Cohen, led to the National Union of Journalists and its General Secretary Michelle Stanistreet overriding the decision of their own Black members group and cancelling it.  Surprisingly both Gary Younge and Aditya Chakrbarti  signed the Guardian petition which was circulated, no doubt under peer pressure to back up their White colleagues.

Hadley Freeman and the Guardian's empty headed Marina Hyde celebrate the cancellation of the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture

The reasons or pretext given for the cancellation was that Canary had endangered the safety of a Guardian journalist Carl David Goette-Luciak who was deported from Nicaragua earlier this year after having become embedded with and an ardent supporter of the right-wing American backed opposition to the Sandanistas.

Lies from di Stefano

Buzzfeed retracted the allegation of di Stefano that Max Blumenthall had 'doxxed' the Guardian's journalist - however di Stefano pretended to be unaware of this

di Stefano boasts about the consequences of the lies that Buzzfeed had to disown, courtesy of the NUJ's political cowardice

This allegation or rather lie, was first made by Buzzfeed’s Mark di Stefano. Buzzfeed later retractedit. The Canary article that the Guardian journalists objected to Investigation slams Guardian cooperation with novice reporter linked to US regime-change machine referenced an article by American journalist Max Blumenthall on Mintpress News How an American Anthropologist Tied to US Regime-Change Proxies Became the MSM’s Man in Nicaragua. The article in fact had nothing to do with the deportation.

The Blue Plaque erected in honour of Claudia Jones

I will blog at a later date in more depth on the Guardian’s role in all of this and in particular its support for the right-wing opposition in Nicaragua.  It is of a piece with it running with the neo-liberal theme tune called ‘anti-Semitism’ in Corbyn’s Labour Party.

Chris Williamson MP extends his solidarity to a Black journalist under attack

It was a great lecture by Kerry and I learnt a lot about someone whom I had barely heard of before. It was an honour and a pleasure to meet and chat with Kerry, who is a highly articulate and media savvy Black journalist in the pub afterwards. Canary which Kerry edits is an important part of the alternative media in this country and I wish them success.  However let Kerry Ann explainthe affair in her own words:

How many privileged columnists does it take to silence one Black woman?

 “I was meant to give the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture this evening. But instead, a group of privileged columnists at the Guardianand other establishment outlets bottled it. They circled the wagons to ensure that a Black woman didn’t get a platform to speak about another Black woman. But it could not have backfired more spectacularly. Because now, they’ve accidentally created a much bigger platform for the speech they were too afraid to hear.

Remembering Claudia Jones

Early this year, the Black Members Council of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) invited me to give the annual Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture. I was thrilled. Claudia Jones was a radical; Black, feminist, communist, and a journalist. She helped launch the Notting Hill Carnival and founded the West Indian Gazette. To the establishment of 1950s England, everything about her was wrong. Her colour, her gender, her politics.

Faced with this closed network of privilege, Claudia built her own platform. And she used it to tell the storiesand present the views which Britain’s establishment press would not. Not a million miles from the work that independent outlets like The Canary, the Ferret, Media Diversified and others do today.

But before the lecture could take place, an email went out to Guardian/Observerjournalists. The event was being hosted in their building, and when they discovered the Black Members Council’s choice of speaker, they went ballistic. BuzzFeed‘s Mark Di Stefano published a leaked email about the reaction:

Excuses, excuses

First, the (mostly) white Guardian columnists and their friends threw a public tantrum. Columnists from across the establishment media took to Twitter with a communal shriek of outrage. How dare this women be allowed to lecture *us*? They recycled the normal accusations:

This was what the cancellation of Kerry Ann Mendoza's lecture was really about - the call to Boycott the Guardian

1.  They don’t pay their journalists! As everyone knows (because we publish it on our website), we actively encourage all of our writers to join and be active in the NUJ. Our team also voted on its own pay deal. The absurd argument that we pay per click only works in the sense that every journalist is paid per click/paper sold, because that’s how every publisher makes their money. Our writers get a flat fee per article based on subscription fees, and a top-up from advertising revenue. As an organisation that started without any outside investment, we have had to earn every penny we pay out to ourselves. Whether we have a great month or an awful month, we share what we earn fairly. This is a very different story to the establishment media, an industry whose bosses routinely bustunions and employ unpaid interns to do the bulk of their work.

2.  They employ an antisemite! We don’t. Canary writer Steve Topple publicly recanted his antisemitic views more than a year before working for us. He didn’t delete his tweets or try to pretend it didn’t happen. He owned it. And he continues to do so. The whole point of the antiracism movement is to end up with fewer racists. Steve is a success story, and I’m proud of him for changing.

3.  They are fake news! This is my personal favourite. The Canary has grown to a team of over 30 journalists and editors, publishing more than 8,000 articles in the past three years. We volunteered to be regulatedindependently, unlike the establishment outlets who self-regulate. When we were found to have publishedan inaccurate story (the sole claim upheld against us since becoming regulated), we made the correction on our front page:

This is routine for us. Whenever we make a significant update or correction to a story, we announce it across all our social media channels with greater prominence than the original. This doesn’t happen in the establishment media.

Unfortunately for the Westminster commentators, people got this. Many have supported us from the start; they’ve followed the growth of The Canary over the last three years and know it’s a very different beast today. We are independently regulated, we have an editorial team of six, a five-stage editorial process, and our articles are written and edited by press-carded, unionised journalists. We are a professional outlet that reachedmore people online in the run-up to the 2017 general election than Reuters, New Statesman, the Economist, the Spectator, the Times and other wealthy, long-established outlets.

Plan B

Next, they tried to force me to step down. They targeted me on social media, like a little gang.

The lecture was no longer about Claudia Jones or the Black Members Council that founded the lecture in her name. Now, it was the Guardian‘s event. This is what tokenism looks like. Wealthy liberals hijacking the history of radical leftists while demonising radical, left voices in their own time.

They held a vote to reject me as speaker. Unfortunately for them, NUJ officers pointed out this wasn’t within their jurisdiction. The NUJ Black Members Council chooses the speaker for the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture, not Guardianwriters. Faced with the lone option to reject the event altogether, they voted in favour of hosting the event.

Carl David Goette-Luciak, the Guardian's man in Nicaragua who his colleague and friend admitted was doing the work of the CIA

When that didn’t work, they threw up a bunch of bogus headlines that I was ‘breaking the Guardian boycott’.

But we knew from reactions in the meeting that it wouldn’t stop there. And it didn’t.

Next, they concocted a fresh smear in order to put pressure on the NUJ to pull the event.

A straight smear

Suddenly, The Canary was apparently responsible for ‘endangering a journalist’. Criticism centred on a report by award-winning journalist Max Blumenthal which pointed to a number of issues with reporting by the Guardian‘s Carl David Goette-Luciak in Nicaragua. Interestingly, this charge was led once more by Mark Di Stefano of BuzzFeed. His story connected our one article on Goette-Luciak with an online doxxing of him. No evidence of the link was made, and there was no effort to challenge the factual basis of Blumenthal’s report. It was a straight smear. One thing reported on top of the other as if the link was obvious.

More fake headlines - the Boycott of the Guardian doesn't extend to contact with their journalists or their offices! Desperate times for Nick Cohen's mob

By 7am the next morning, BuzzFeed was forced to retract the accusation. But it didn’t have the integrity to pull the story or post a prominent correction. Instead, it added this ‘update’ at the bottom.

It considers it an ‘update’ to say ‘although we spend this entire article insinuating a link between these two things, there is actually no link between the two things’. Whatever that is, it’s not journalism.

Witch hunt

NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet then pulled the lecture from the Guardian building. Di Stefano tweeted a quote from her which indirectly condemned us for the false allegations BuzzFeed had already retracted.

Di Stefano then announced the cancellation on Twitter, before any of us had been informed.

He failed to mention, however, that his own site had been forced to row back on the smear that triggered the cancellation.

But the story had served its purpose. It created a face-saving ‘out’ for the NUJ and the Guardian. They needed to be able to say ‘we aren’t no-platforming one of the handful of BAME editors-in-chief in UK media – we’re defending journalism!’

The irony here is that these columnists are guilty of their own charge. They began a campaign of harassment against a fellow journalist. They knowingly promoted the smear which had already been rowed back on by the outlet that had made it. And they did so in a cynical attempt to no-platform a Black woman journalist. It also fills me with a peculiar kind of horror that this was enabled by the general secretary of my own union.

So what now?

On Friday 12 October, the NUJ is meetingto discuss the allegations against The Canary; allegations which have already been publicly retracted by the outlet that made them. Stanistreet has overruled the will of the Black Members Council. And she did so on the word of BuzzFeed; an organisation that worked hard to ensure its own workers remain un-unionised.

And so my lecture will happen at another location, on a different day, and it will be streamed around the world. Instead of a small tribute to Claudia Jones, it will be a rallying cry for everyone who is tired of the morally bankrupt establishment media.

For the columnist class, this was never about Claudia Jones, or me, or The Canary. It was about a handful of obscenely privileged Westminster columnists ganging up to avoid being embarrassed. They didn’t want to have to sit and grimace while their industry was criticised from the outside. And they resorted to lies, smears and confected outrage to avoid it.

But they still lost.

They placed themselves on the wrong side of history and exposed their paternalistic, classist, racist attitudes to the world. So I’d like to thank each of them for screwing this up so badly. Because this speech is made all the more important and poignant by the attempts to shut it down.

How many privileged columnists does it take to silence one Black woman? Trick question. They never have, and they never will.

Featured image via Bristol Post, Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay

https://youtu.be/SJuCefyI4XQ

https://youtu.be/Hu_eb441zrc

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Is this the most trivial, trite and superficial article that the New Statesman has ever run?

November 2, 2018, 4:14 pm

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Or How Karen Glaser’sex-boyfriend had a very very narrow escape!

On her blog we learn that Karen Glaser is ‘an experienced journalist’ whose ‘journalism has been syndicated internationally.’ This perhaps tells us more about the standards of journalism today than the quality of Ms Glaser’s output.  Karen tells us that she writes on relationshipsand Jewish mattersand that she has been a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle, which is not encouraging given the decline in the latter’s circulation and its role as a Zionist megaphone. She boasts that the guests on her Guardian podcasts have included David Aaronovitch and Melanie Phillips, which hardly gives us much confidence in her claim to be a left-wing British Jew. But perhaps she means a ‘left-wing’ Zionist which is an entirely different thing. In short Karen is just the kind of tame establishment journalist that The Staggers loves to indulge.

The New Statesman, which used to consider itself on the left, has been second only to the Guardian in its venomous attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and its indulgence of his Zionist critics (for example the abysmal articleby the Jewish Labour Movement’s Mike Katz and Adam Langleben on why they supported the IHRA). My attention was drawn to what must count as just the most trivial articleI have yet read of the anti-Corbyn genre. Ms Glaser’s Why I kicked my boyfriend out at 2am over anti-Semitism in the Labour party. It is the Zionist equivalent of Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster and bears about the same relationship to the truth.

The New Statesman's Bizarre anti-Corbyn Story

Apparently this tragic lonely heart had been in a relationship with ‘Sean’ for some 9 months before discovering his ‘anti-Semitism’. He is you understand a Corbynite and these people are nothing if not clever and devious.  Presumably he hid his anti-Semitism under the bed sheets for all of the 9 months until Karen had her epiphany.  Or perhaps he pretended he was a Tory? We have Karen’s assurance that Tories are never anti-Semitic so it’s no wonder that Karen was fooled by this dastardly swine.

Apparently Sean ‘gestured in exaggerated fashion’to her many possessions. “Well, your life looks OK to me,” which is proof that she had been sharing her most intimate secrets with Himmler’s bastard offspring. How dare the upstart suggest that Karen’s life is a bed of roses when anyone can see that it consists of tears and strife, toil and trouble to say nothing of public self-humiliation. She had clearly been in bed with an anti-Semite if not a fully fledge Nazi. It is one of life's wonders that Karen is not suffering from PTSD.

When told that she seemed to be comfortably off Karen, sharp as a button, responded instantly that “Lots of Jews had nice apartments in 1930s Berlin,” and we all know what happened to Germany’s Jews. What an insensitive soul she had shacked up with not to realise that Corbyn’s Gestapo was about to nationalise her flat whilst putting her in ‘protective detention’ along with all those other Jewish capitalists.

Karen you understand was doing her best not to appear to be the ‘hyperbolic Jew of anti-Semitic ridicule.’ Rest assured Karen, only an anti-Semite could possibly suggest that you were exaggerating your pain, being hyperbolic or behaving like a typical JAP (Jewish American Princess).  After all, everyone knows that Momentum’s uniform includes regulation jackboots for the day when Fuhrer Corbyn takes control.

Karen Glaser - A Journalist Whose Talents Lie in Fiction Writing

Karen tells us, in one of those romantic moments that we all treasure, that ‘I really liked’ Sean.  After this public drubbing you wonder what exactly it was that she liked about him, apart from having the patience of a saint or two. You get the feeling that it might have been preferable to have had a relationship with a tarantula rather than take the risk of being Karen’s consort.

And when Sean told Karen ‘that Labour’s anti-Semitism had been massively overstated, that it was essentially a tawdry attempt to smear Corbyn’ you could have heard a pin drop. Its akin to taking communion and drinking the blood of Christ naked or even worse, eating a ham sandwich in an Orthodox synagogue (which the Jewish anarchists used to do!).

However Karen, a woman with a permanently shimmering halo,‘took a deep breath and answered him properly.’ as one should of course though one suspects that she must have considered reaching for the rolling pin.  Our Jewish heroine ‘explained to my lover that this is no laughing matter’.

Here we have an existentialist clash of love and life. When the jackboots are on the doorstep, the last thing you want is for your lover to question your fears of an imminent demise.  Karen was, in essence, a budding Jamal Khashoggi.

Karen patiently explained ‘that there is a consensus across Anglo-Jewry that there is a serious problem of anti-Semitism in Labour’.  And where there is a consensus there is eternal life and truth. Clearly this ingrate, who one assumes isn’t even Jewish, was incapable of demonstrating even the slightest empathy with Karen’t horrible predicament.

At this point I feel duty bound to point out that Israel was founded in order to stop the Karens, Beckys and Sarahs of this world bedding down with shegetzes. For those who are unacquainted with these things let me explain that the shegetz like its female counterpart, the shiksa, is derived from the Yiddish word sheketz, which roughly translated means an abomination, an unclean thing, a detested thing.  Rabbi Jack Abramowitz described it as "simply indefensible", "inherently condescending, racist and misogynistic". Nonetheless non-Jewish boyfriends are inherently risky.

This is the real racism not fake anti-Semitism

However I digress. Karen is nothing if not broadminded and despite being a Zionist had no objection to having a shegetz for a partner. One can only hope that she has learnt her lesson and that in future she keeps it in the tribe. If she were in Israel she would be known as a trollope and worse. Miscegenation is taken seriously in the Holy Land because it isn’t so much a question of religion but racial purity whereas in the diaspora these things are only too common.  50%+ of American Jews 'marry out'. 

Karen whose patience is one of the most loveable things about her, tried to explain to this non-Jewish parvenu that ‘if Tory politicians had done half the things to any other ethnic group that Corbyn has done to the Jews, leftists would be baying for blood.’

Now I know that the anti-Semites who read this blog will probably scoff and chuckle at this but Karen has a point. In fact a number of points. After all it is well known that when it comes to ‘other ethnic groups’ the Tories are a model of British tolerance and good manners. Indeed the party of the grisly May has never, as far as I am aware, ever advocated discrimination against anyone on the grounds of religion, race or sexual orientation. Enoch Powell is but a distant memory.

Yes I know that the Tory party are in alliance with a range of anti-Semitic parties (at least 3 – Swedish Democrats, Poland’s Law &; Justice and Latvia’s Fatherland and Freedom Parties) – in the European Conservative and Reform group in the European parliament.  Of course Tory MEPs voted to defend the anti-Semitic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in a vote of censure recently. But quite rightly Karen would have dismissed this as totally irrelevant.  She’s not talking old-fashioned anti-Semitism i.e. hatred of Jews she is talking Israel and hatred of Zionism.

Perhaps someone can supply the name of Jewish people killed by the Police in custody?

The Windrush scandal was merely a figment of someone’s imagination.  ‘Hostile environment’ policy? That’s just another name for global warming.  Stop and search? That’s just the Police being helpful to Black kids who’ve lost their way in life. Black deaths in custody?  Well everyone has got to die somewhere.  Clearly Karen has got a point.  If other ethnic groups had suffered  a fraction of what Jews have had to put with under Corbyn, that pound shop British Goebbels, then us leftists would have risen up.  It could well have turned into another Peterloo such would have been our anger.

And when Sean asked, ‘as Corbynistas always do’ what Corbyn had actually done, then Karen went through her ‘grim list’.  And for the doubting Thomases here let me assure you that the list is indeed Grimm as in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. 

All of these men according to Karen Glaser have 'hook noses'

Having been provoked, beyond endurance, by her non-Jewish lover, Karen let forth: There was his absurd claim that Hamas and Hezbollah ‘are dedicated to peace and justice’ when we all know that it was Hezbollah which invaded Israel in 1982 and again in 2006.  Indeed this terror group occupied a large swathe of land in Northern Israel for years with a puppet Zionist in charge. As for Hamas, we all know what they are capable of.  They even send forth hundreds and thousands of demonstrators to the fence with Israel with strict instructions to get themselves killed, forcing the poor Israeli boys to do just that.  Because as we know ‘Hamas’s charter calls for the destruction of the Jews’ (it doesn’t!) and it would seem the destruction of the Palestinians too. Then there is Corbyn’s defence of the blood libeller Raed Salah (again not true but what’s a lie between lovers?) to say nothing of his membership of Facebook groups ‘where deeply anti-Semitic posts are the norm’ (also not true) and ‘his siding with those behind the now infamous Nazi-style mural showing hook-nosed anti-Semitic caricatures, getting rich on the backs of the world’s poor.’ The latter refers to a mural of 6 bankers, 4 of whom were non-Jewish, none of whom had a hook nose. Why let a few facts come between lovers?

Of course there will be some cynics reading this who will be credulous at this point but I ask you to restrain your laughter.  This is a serious and difficult matter for Karen who ‘tried to explain to the man with whom I’d just shared my bed just how painful this all was.’ Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity will by now realise the difficulty poor Karen was in.  The conflict between her love and lust for Sean and her horror at his clear anti-Semitism posed a dilemma that no woman should have to undergo.

Karen however was nothing if not patient with her errant Sean.  She explained that in the past decade some 40,000 Jews had emigrated from France to Israel.  Of course, like all Zionist statistics this is somewhat misleading. After the murder of 4 Jews in the Hypercacher supermarket in 2015 Israel did its best to stimulate the emigration of Jews.  Netanyahu came over to Paris to tell the Jews there that their ‘real home’ was Israel but not only did they not come in the expected numbers but of those who did come ‘many of them are also returning to France in greater numbers’ according to Andy Semotiuk. Zionism’s answer to anti-Semitism has never been to fight it but to do what the anti-Semites want, which is to leave and set up their own racial state. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2014 there were 6,547 Jewish emigrants from France and in 2015, despite the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher murders the number rose only to 6,628. In 2016, the number dropped to 4,239 and in 2017 there were only 3,157. In the first five months of 2018 there were just 759 emigrants. In short there are lies, damned lies and Karen’s statistics. Why the Expected Wave of French Immigration to Israel Never Materialized

Karen, whose patience with her shegetz, was almost superhuman, explained to the anti-Semitic misfit that ‘mocking Jews when they call out anti-Semitism, is analogous to white people telling black people they are imagining their experiences of racism.’ Well put. Read from the crib sheet with perfection. The only problem is that Jews in Britain are White not Black.  Not only White but the most privileged section of the White community in terms of socio-economic status. It was noticeable that in all her examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ none of them actually related to anything that has actually disadvantaged British Jews.  They all related to Israel. Strange that.

Even worse poor Sean then blurted out that ‘Jews have money, don’t they?’ whilst hastening to reassure Karen that he wasn’t talking about her.

By this time, you will understand that Karen Glaser had just about had enough of Sean and quite understandably she exploded. Anti-Semitism in her boudoir was really too much. Since Jews don’t have saints, one almost wonders whether Pope Francis might help out and canonise the Blessed Karen Glaser.  I realise that you have to be dead before the process of beatification begins but I’m sure that Karen, halo intact, could be made an exception. She patiently told the miscreant that:

‘the point is that anti-Semitism is never about Jews and the actual lives they lead, and one of the central tropes of anti-Semitism is the pernicious association between Jews and money. It never, ever goes away. For many on the left this means that the Jews can never be oppressed or exploited but are, in fact, the source of others’ oppression and exploitation. That’s why Corbyn couldn’t see anything wrong with that vile mural. It matched his world view.

You will understand I am sure the magnitude of young Sean’s offence. Indeed I am surprised that Karen didn’t pick up her phone, dial 999 and report him for a hate crime.  I should imagine that 6 months in the clink might be the best cure (since being deprived of Karen’s nocturnal favours probably won’t be punishment enough).

Before m’lud pronounces sentence it is probably fair to quote a couple of Jewish experts who can be witness to Sean’s anti-Semitic crimes.

The first is William Rubinstein, a past President of the Jewish Historical Society. In his book The Right, Left and the Jews, (Croom Helm, 1982) Rubinstein writes that

the rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status has led to the near disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size : indeed the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size.... it has made Marxism, and other radical doctrines, irrelevant to the socio-economic bases of Western Jewry, and increasingly unattractive to most Jews.

While there have been many wealthy and powerful Jewish individuals and dynasties throughout modern history, only since the 1950s has Western Jewry as a whole risen into the upper-middle class. And the Jewish proletariat transformed itself into a near-universal Jewish bourgeoisie.’ p. 51

Perhaps we should quickly pass on since it’s obvious that this Rubinstein fellow is also anti-Semitic. How about the much more reasonable Geoffrey Alderman, who is a right-wing columnist for the Jewish Chronicle?  In his book ‘The Jewish Community in British Politics, Clarendon Press 1983, Alderman writes (p. 137)

the tendency for British Jews to be found in the higher social classes is very evident. In 1961 over 40 per cent of Anglo-Jewry was located in the upper two social classes, whereas these categories accounted for less than 20 per cent of the general population. The electoral consequences of this trend become clear when it is remembered that , at the time of the 1964 general election which Labour won, three -quarters of the top two social classes supported the conservative party.

Hmm. Maybe not. So it seems that not only is Sean right about Jews being more prosperous than the average Gentile but we have also stumbled on the real reason why so few Jews vote Labour today. Nothing to do with that left-wing Adolf Corbyn.  It would seem that it’s no longer in their interest to do so, as just about anyone who has lived in a Jewish community will tell you. They are insufferably bourgeois.  It was not for nothing that in Thatcher’s constituency of Finchley Jews constituted one of her main support bases.

The ever patient Karen, who truth be told wanted to hang on to Sean if at all possible, then got on to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. I know what some of you malcontents are going to say. That people like Geoffrey Robertson QC have slagged it off as being not fit for purposebut as Karen explained the IHRA

‘was written in response to this hatred, a definition to help European police forces and prosecutors better understand it. That’s why the Labour Party’s refusal to adopt it in full for so long caused huge hurt and pain.’

And nothing defines our Karen so much as pain.  Her article oozes the stuff. The fact that the IHRA mentions Israel more than Jews is completely irrelevant. Its sole concern is anti-Semitism. After all it’s a Working Definition on Anti-Semitism and has been for the past 14 years. What further proof do you need of its relevance than the fact that all those Tories support it? There is barely an anti-Semite in the world, Orban, Trump, Netanyahu, who doesn’t support it.

Up piped our irrepressible Sean ‘“Britain has hate speech and anti-discrimination laws.  Why do Jews need additional protection?” A good question you might think but I beg you to understand that this last, flippant comment was what we in the trade call the straw that broke the camel’s back (if comparing a Jew to a camel isn’t anti-Semitic).

The legendary Robert Fisk of The Independent

You will now understand why Sean’s insolent and brazen refusal to emphathise with his erstwhile lover led to the breakdown of a beautiful relationship. One can only imagine the pained expression on Karen as she barked ‘I think it’s time for you to leave’.

As St. Karen of Golders Green explained to The Stagger’s readership

‘Corbynistas’ standard response to Jews is that they know their claims of anti-Semitism are false and that they make them to smear the Labour leader. Of course this doesn’t explain why this woman threw her (now ex) lover out of her freshly painted flat at 2.30 am.’

Never a truer word spoken in jest.  Karen is right. Sean’s impudence doesn’t explain why ‘this woman’ behaved as she did.  I can only presume it was a product of the fact that for all her wittering about ‘anti-Semitism’ she could not explain how it was that anti-Semitism had only risen since Jeremy Corbyn had become leader of the Labour Party and why Tory links with genuine anti-Semites never seemed to get a look in.  Or indeed why, if Labour was indeed anti-Semitic  it was the papers of the Right, like the Daily Mail, the paper that supported Hitler in the 1930’s and which opposed the immigration of Jewish refugees from Nazism, who were hottest on Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’.

One of a rare breed - Robert Fisk - The Independent's Legenday Middle East correspondent

There is only one moral one can draw from this story and it is an old one.  Hell has no fury like a woman scorned. Karen Glaser deserves to be scorned and treated with complete disdain and contempt for the dishonesty of this account, from beginning to end. If it did indeed occur then we can rest assured that it is a parody of the breakdown in her relationship with ‘Sean’.  I suspect, like the odyssey of the Children of Israel in the Sinai desert it is a comfortable myth which hides more than it reveals about Karen’s personal life.

It would of course be interesting to hear Sean’s account of this fairy tale but for the New Statesman to do that would be to break a habit of a lifetime.  It would mean conceding a right of reply to someone who had been abused and traduced. Even if his name has been changed there is no doubt that there will be people who know of Karen’s ex-partner and will think worse of him as a result.

However that is as nothing when one considers that Sean should count himself extremely fortunate to be free of this hectoring, bullying, self centred and superficial woman. That she is probably typical of British journalists and the staff on the New Statesman is indeed a cause for reflection if not concern. Pundits and commentators today are little more than prostitutes doing their proprietor’s bidding. Their opinions are for sale and any journalist with an independent streak is unlikely to gain and retain employment on most newspapers.

Patrick Cockburn - part of a journalistic dynasty

I can think of just two, possibly three, journalists who retain any credibility or independence today.  Patrick Cockburn, the legendary Robert Fisk and John Pilger. The first two are employed by The Independent and Pilger has no regular paper.  Instead we have a succession of mediocrities flitting between The Guardian, New Statesman and BBC, none of whom challenges the neo-liberal view of the world that sees capitalism as a good thing and inevitable and which is incapable of marrying up things like poverty, global warming and climate change with the social and economic system that produces these phenomenon.

Perhaps I have wasted too much time on Karen Glaser, who is really just an insipid and insignificant reflection of other peoples’ thoughts. Someone who retails hasbara  as her own original thought and whose view of the world is coloured by her own perception of her ‘oppression’.  At the end of the day Karen Glaser’s article says as much about the editors at the New Statesman as it does about her.

Below is a letter I rushed off to the New Statesman. It will not of course be published.

Tony Greenstein

letters@newstatesman.co.uk, comments@newstatesman.co.uk

Attacking Jeremy Corbyn for ‘anti-Semitism’ is of far more interest than an article explaining why Donald Trump, Israel’s best friend, bears the political and moral responsibility for Pittsburgh

Or why Karen Glaser’s boyfriend should count himself extraordinarily lucky to have escaped the clutches of this stupid woman

New Statesman Limited
John Carpenter House
7 Carmelite Street
Blackfriars
London EC4Y 0BS

Dear Editor,

Are there no limits to the New Statesman's shallowness?  It seems that the Staggers is determined to plumb the depths of the sewer in order to attack Jeremy Corbyn.

Even by your abysmal standards 'Why I kicked my boyfriend out at 2am over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party'reaches new heights of absurdity.  We expect this kind of trivia from the Establishment’s Guardian but is this all the New Statesman can contribute? A sly and snide article signifying nothing other than your own miserable fury?

Simple questions such as why is it that 'antisemitism' is of such a concern in the Labour Party at a time of the ongoing Windrush scandal (i.e. real and genuine racism) are too much for you. Or how about asking why it is that the Tories’ alliance with 3 antisemitic parties in the European Parliament - the Swedish Democrats, Poland's Law & Justice Party and Latvia's Freedom and Fatherland Party - is of such little concern? 

Of course I understand that the habit of Latvia's MEP Robert Zile in marching alongside the veterans of Latvia's Waffen SS each March is not in the same league as Corbyn’s iniquities but then we have Israel to defend.

Saying that Jews have money i.e. they tend to be privileged is clearly more important than Tory MEPs voting to defend the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban. After all Orban is best friends with Benjamin Netanyahu, even if Holocaust survivors picketted him when he paid homage at Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem in July. 

The fact that Orban described the pro-Nazi ruler of Hungary during the war, Admiral Horthy, as an 'exceptional statesman.' pales into insignificance compared to Corbyn’s mural. Presiding over the deportation of half a million Jews to Auschwitz bears no comparison to meeting with Hamas and, god forbid, Hezbollah.

Let us not get hung up on the little white lies that Karen Glaser managed to insert into her article.  Raed Salah has always denied the blood libel allegation and it is interesting that the Jerusalem magistrates court acquitted him of this accusation before the higher colonial District Court overturned his acquittal. Or that the famous mural did not have any hook nosed Jews in it.  Or that Hamas has changed its Charter but that in any case when Israel commits mass murder in the name .of ‘the Jews’ it is unsurprising that they might consider their enemy ‘the Jews’.

Even stranger how these genocidalist anti-Semites condemned the murder of Jews at Pittsburgh. But why should you let facts get in the way of your campaign against Corbyn?

The New Statesman was born in the womb of Fabian imperialism.  Trusteeship rather than exploitation was its watchword.  Hence why it was an early supporter of Zionism. However under Lord Passfield and Clement Attlee Fabian imperialism demonstrated that it was no different to that of Tory imperialism. 

Karen Glaser's boyfriend should count himself extraordinarily lucky that he has managed to free himself from the clutches of this stupid woman.

Tony Greenstein

Tony Greenstein

Suspended from UNISON for Defending Freedom of Speech and the Right of Free Assembly

November 4, 2018, 8:27 pm

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Run by its Officials for its Officials  UNISON's General Secretary Dave Prentis  knowingly allowed Union resources to be used to get himself elected

One thing is certain - Prentis will certainly miss Linda Perks - who faithfully did his bidding, rules notwithstanding

On March 26^th, as Labour’s local election campaign got underway, as part of the false anti-Semitism campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, various Zionist organisations organised their first ever ‘anti-racist’ demonstration, outside Parliament.  

On the recent NHS demonstration

A counter demonstration was mounted by Jewish Voice for Labour supported by Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW) and other groups. One of the demonstrators was Stan Keable, the Secretary of LAW.

Stan got into a conversation about the Holocaust, in the course of which Stan stated that the Holocaust wasn’t only caused by anti-Semitism (a statement of the obvious – anti-Semitism has existed long before the Holocaust) and that the Zionist movement had collaborated with the Nazis in the period leading up to the Holocaust.

Mark Fischer - a Prentis loyalist who chaired the disciplinary panel

One of the wing members of the Panel

Linda Crowther - one of the wing members of the Panel - silent throughout

Unknown to Stan his conversation had secretly been recorded and before long it was placed on social media. This resulted in headlines in papers like The Standard and the Jewish Chronicle. The next day local Tory MP, Greg Hands sent out a tweet demanding action against Stan and Steve Cowan, leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, where Stan was an employee, was only too happy to oblige.

Stan was promptly suspended and in May I represented Stan at his disciplinary hearing, the result of which was that he was dismissed.  As a lay representative from Brighton and Hove I should not, have had to represent Stan but when Stan approached UNISON’s London Regional Organiser, Steve Terry for support he received none.

Maggie Ferncombe - London Regional Secretary and a fitting successor to Linda Perks

Terry’s advice was that Stan should plead guilty.  In a letter of May 8^th Terry advised Stan that:

‘the course that you should take is to indicate that you regret any offence caused by your remarks and plead mitigating circumstances.’

A supporter of Progress, Terry should have declared a conflict of interest between his right-wing views and those of Stan Keable. His own prejudices rendered him incapable of seeing that there was only one issue, namely freedom of speech and the right of free assembly of workers. Rights guaranteed under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Terry however is a typical UNISON bureaucrat, completely incapable of comprehending such issues. 

On the recent NHS demonstration in Brighton

The two main charges laid against Stan were:

1.        That, in attending a counter demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament on the 26th March 2018, you knowingly increased the possibility of being challenged about your views and subsequently proceeded to express views that were in breach of the Council’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy and the Council’s Code of Conduct (‘Working with integrity’ and ‘Working with the media’).

2.        That you made inappropriate comments which were subsequently circulated on social media which are deemed to be insensitive and likely to be offensive and potentially in breach of the Equality Act 2010 and/or the Council’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy.

Steve Terry could find nothing wrong in disciplining workers for expressing their views.

It takes something for Jon Lansman's blog to accuse someone of ballot rigging!

Clearly these charges were a threat to all workers. The idea that by ‘causing offence’ Stan was guilty of a disciplinary offence is outrageous.  The right to free speech is meaningless if all you have the right to do is to utter platitudes. Giving offence is integral to freedom of speech unless you are inciting people to racial or other forms of hatred (i.e. hurting or insulting someone on the basis of an unalterable characteristic (age, disability etc.). Stan was doing none of these things. He was criticising Zionism. See

picket outside UNISON Executive protesting at the attempt to rig the General Secretary election

picket of UNISON's Executive  meeting

Of course Terry was unconcerned by such matters. It is doubtful that anything bar the size of his remuneration is of any interest to him. It was not surprising that Terry, who is not used to criticism from members, complained to his boss, Maggie Ferncombe, the London Regional Secretary with whom I have crossed swords when she was the South-East Regional Secretary.

On June 4^th I was called to an investigation hearing conducted by 2 more officials, Gail Adams and Tony Jones, who is himself a Labour councillor in Reading! I have already publishedthe interview and youcan read the whole interview here or you can listen to the tape of the interview  here. Suffice to say that the outcome of the investigation was as I predicted.  I was charged on 3 counts:

My defence, that the principle conceded by UNISON in the case of Stan Keable was going to be used by other Councils to attack the rights of other workers has come to pass. Paul Jonson, an anti-social officer for Dudley Council has just been suspended for attending a picket outside right-wing Labour MP Ian Austen’s office and putting a post on Facebook which described Israel as a ‘racist endeavour.’

On Monday 8^th October I was called to a disciplinary hearing to face 3 charges.

i.              That I had engaged in disrespectful or intimidating behaviour, or had exposed Steve Terry to didicule, embarrassment or contempt and I had violated his dignity.

ii.            That I hadn’t maintained strict confidentiality over the kangaroo court procedures adopted against me.

iii.         That I had broken, disobeyed etc. union rules.

Those hearing my case –Chair Mark Fischer, Linda Crowther and Maggie Cook of the National Executive Council, were clearly not happy with the fact that I had secretly recordedthe investigation hearing. Union bureaucrats and their servants are always happiest when they can operate in the dark so the first thing that happened when we began was that everyone had to place their phone in a tray which was placed out side the room. Unfortunately this trick doesn’t appear to have worked as my phone had no difficulty picking up what took place and the transcript can be seen here!

Presenting officer Gail Adams CBE was most offended by my suggestion that the hearing was a ‘stitch-up’. She emphasised that if I had argued that someone else had put my blog post up or had had access to my blog then she would have been more than willing to acquite me of the charges.

However Gail entirely missed the point. It was not that I denied what I had said but that I justified it as being necessary in the circumstances.  The real crime in this case was not what I had written about that miserable union bureaucrat Steve Terry but what he had done to a union member.

I demonstrated beyond all doubt that there is no redress for union members when they are sold out and betrayed by the union leadership. Back came the parroted response that I had broken ‘the rules’ by subjecting Terry to ridicule, contempt etc.  I have to say that I have no respect for someone who is willing to sacrifice a union member’s right to free speech for the sake of the ‘rules’.  To me Terry is contemptible. Certainly I had not intimidated him, how could I? By speaking on the phone?  But then the charge is that I may have exposed Terry to ‘ridicule, embarrassment or contempt.’  If the truth be told then it is indeed ridiculous to behave as Terry did. Terry unfortunately shows no signs of being embarrassed and as for contempt, surely that is the proper reaction to a union official and Labour councillor who betrays his membership?   As for violating the dignity of Terry, well that assumes he had any to begin with.

The actual complaint was made by  Maggie Ferncombe, the London Regional Secretary who I had an encounter with when she fulfilled the same role in the South East. Clearly this presented me with a problem since the person who I had allegedly affronted, Steve Terry, was not available for cross-examination. This is the basis of part of my appeal, I had apparently humiliated etc. someone who is not giving evidence and is unavailable.  The relevant part of the cross-examination is below, although you can look at the full transcript here:

Just imagine, in a court of law, you are accused of insulting, intimidating etc. someone and then that person doesn’t give evidence but someone who talked to him does. This is UNISON’s idea of justice. As you can see I made Maggie Ferncombe, the London Regional Secretary and a fitting successor to Linda Perks (see below). In essence she knew nothing.

TG: [54:00] You made the complaint about me?

MF: I did

TG: ... and yet the obvious thing would have been for him to have made the complaint. Would it not?

MF: I can’t speak for Steve.

TG: But you spoke to him.

MF: I can’t speak for Steve whether it’s obvious or not for him to make a complaint. What I can say is that Steve raised it with me because of the subject matter. He believed that it was an issue that I needed to be aware of, that there was a potential, most regional organisers will come to me if they think there’s an issue that the press may or may not be interested in, because we must be prepared to have a response. He raised it with me and I then read your blog and once I had read your blog that is when I decided I would make a complaint.

TG: Can you enlighten us as to why he did not make a complaint?

MF: I don’t know.

TG: You spoke to him but you have no idea why, you did not ask him?

MF: No.

TG: You weren’t interested?

MF: No.

TG: You did not invite him to make a complaint?

MF: No

TG: You did not think it was necessary for him to make a complaint?

MF: I think that was down to the member of staff (TG: clearly) I took my responsibilities as a senior manager of the region to determine that I didn’t think this was appropriate, I thought it was outside of our norms fact

TG: I realise that

MF: and I took the decision to make the complaint. And in fact I informed Steve that I had made the complaint.

TG: But Steve had the right to make the complaint if he was aggrieved. Did he not?

MF: All members of staff have the right to make a complaint.

TG: So you have no idea, on the basis of your relationship with him, why he chose not to make a complaint?

MF: (after some considerable delay) I can only say that it is highly highly unusual in my experience for a member of staff to make a complaint about a member.

TG: Well maybe this case is maybe highly unusual so it wouldn’t be exceptional?

MF: I can’t speak for Steve.

TG: What was the nature of your conversation with ST?

MF: I just explained that he said that there was an issue that was happening in that particular branch, regarding a member and that he was going to be advising and that he thought that I needed to be aware of it on the basis that it might attract interest from the press and therefore we might be contacted as have most other of my regional organisers over the years when there has been an issue going on with a member of the branch that the press might be interested in. So that we were prepared.

TG: The charges against me today are ... that I was disrespectful, intimidating, I exposed him to ridicule, embarrassment and contempt and it violated his dignity. If we go through those. Did he say that I disrespected him?

MF: I did not have a great deal of conversation regarding how Steve felt regarding the blog at all.

TG: So you weren’t curious as to how he felt?

MF: Steve didn’t offer how he felt when I had a conversation with him. Steve offered that there was an issue I needed to be aware of in one of our branches that I would need to be prepared for should the media decide to

TG: Sorry he didn’t come to you and say ‘I’m feeling intimidated as a result of the behaviour of Mr Greenstein?’

MF: No.

TG: Did he say that he felt ridiculed or embarrassed or felt that I held him in contempt?

MF: No.

TG: Did he say that I had violated his dignity?

MF: No.

TG: So would you agree that these charges are entirely speculative? That they have no basis or foundation and are not the subject of an allegation.

MF: No, I don’t agree with that.

TG: But nonetheless he did not make any complaint as to this nature did he?

MF: No but the charges talk about conduct which may and I believe your conduct

TG: So it may have exposed him but there is no evidence to suggest that it did expose him

MF: Well I haven’t really done an investigation into what...

The Chair, Mark Fischer, who is part of the Prentis right-wing of the union, was not happy with my cross-examination. This favourite phrase was ‘Let’s stick to the facts.’ On one occasion I was forced to respond that:

TG:  WellI’m giving you the facts. You may not like them but I can’t give you any others!

Appendix 2 of the UNISON rule book has been written with the express purpose of protecting unelected union officials from their own members.  As I repeatedly emphasised during the hearing there is no redress or accountability of union officials and that is the real crime in this case but of course no charges were ever brought or contemplated being brought against Terry because the whole process was in the hands of UNISON officials.

What my case demonstrates is the democratic deficit in UNISON.   UNISON is not a left-wing union. In the past 8 years, at a time of massive cuts in local government, it has failed to defend its members’ jobs, conditions or pay. Indeed the union officials have fought against any attempts to take action. Prentis is infamous for his lack of a backbone.

Despite the fact that UNISON has good policy on Palestine and supports BDS it has also supported the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign. 

It is ironic that the Executive Officer who was responsible for my case was Beth Bickerstaffe, the daughter-in-law of a previous General Secretary, the late Rodney Bickerstaffe and before you ask I am sure that the appointment process was open, transparent and fair! The irony lies in the fact that Rodney Bickerstaffe, who was a supporter of Palestine, when he spoke at a PSC AGM attacked the use of false accusations of anti-Semitism against supporters of Palestine.  This understanding seems to have disappeared from his successors..

That is what the actions of Terry are about.  He is a fulsome supporter of the idea that support for the Palestinians is ‘anti-Semitic’ and in particular criticism of Zionism. That is why Stan was abandoned and that is why I was subject to a bogus ‘investigation’ the outcome of which was inevitable.

I was also charged with a breach of confidentiality and although I was technically guilty I argued that in order to bring the greater crime, Terry’s treachery, to light it was necessary to publicise his crimes. However in the eyes of my accusers this defence carried no weight.

I made it clear that in the event of being found guilty, I had no intention of pleading mitigation as I had done nothing wrong. I was sentenced to the maximum possible punishment (bar expulsion) which was 3 years suspension with loss of membership rights.

When UNISON Officials Broke UNISON’s Election Rules

A fitting farewell to the ever loyal Linda Perks

As London Regional Secretary Linda Perks was Dave Prentis's Fixer - Union rulers were there to be broken

Compare this case with the breaking rules which occurred during the 2015 election for a General Secretary. The culprit was the London Regional Secretary for Linda Perks. Perks held a briefing, of which this is a recording for Regional Organisers at UNISON’s Greater London Regional Office. Those attending were paid UNISON staff, attending in work time.

In clear contravention of the election procedures, which instruct staff that they should not in work time “carry out any activities intended or likely to … …affect the election or candidature of any person“, Perks gave detailed instructions to staff about campaigning for Prentis. She made it clear that she was speaking as a manager to staff by repeatedly referring them to Regional Managers.

“You clearly cannot be caught out saying ‘vote for Dave'” she says, and warns staff to be careful that, if there are witnesses to conversations in which they are lobbying for Dave Prentis to be sure that they are “friendly witnesses.” She names the official in whose (UNISON) office Dave Prentis’ election leaflets will be kept but advises staff not to mention this by email.

This was unequivocal evidence of the most blatant disregard for UNISON Rules on the part of the Greater London Regional Office. Paid officials joke about using the name of the Regional Convenor to justify distributing election leaflets for Dave Prentis – and about how to distract branches which they describe as “the opposition.” This is the same office that I came into conflict with.

The case eventually wound up with the Union Certification Officer who confirmed that Unison broke the election rules. See for example

Rogue Unison Regional Secretary breaking UNISON Rules in election-rigging scandal

https://libcom.org/blog/unison-paid-officials-caught-sabotaging-leadership-election-08122015

The implications of the Certification Officer decision in UNISON's Greater London Region Jon Rogers

In her rulingthe Assistant Certification Officer, Mary Stacey, found:

3.       ‘that the Union breached paragraph 51 of the General Secretary 2015 Election Procedures ("the Election Procedures")  in that the Union's funds, property and resources were impermissibly used to campaign for a particular candidate (Mr Dave Prentis) by reason of the following matters

(2)     At a meeting of all Greater London Regional Staff held at Congress House at 2pm 21 October 2015, during work time the Regional Secretary of the London Region openly campaigned for Mr Prentis re-election for General Secretary and directed her staff to campaign for Mr Prentis during working time, and was assisted and supported by her Regional Management Team.

109    the impermissible use of UNISON resources by Ms Perks by using a workplace meeting during work time to promote Mr Prentis as a candidate and belittle all the others, and constitutes campaigning.

138. In summary, the meeting was used by the Regional Secretary, openly during work time and with the support of her RMT to campaign for Mr Prentis' re-election. She instructed her staff also to campaign for Mr Prentis in defiance of the election Procedures and directed them to report to their line manager within her RMT

139. It is apparent from the transcript that Ms Perks knew that she was breaching UNISON rules in the meeting and seeking to enlist the collusion of her staff.

143. It is clear that leaflets in support of Mr Prentis were to be covertly stored at the Greater London Regional office in breach of the Election Procedures. Ms Perks repeatedly tells her staff not to leave an email trail about using the Greater London Regional office as a distribution hub for the leaflets:

145. In response to a question Ms Perks tells her staff that they should tell the members to lie about having received campaign material in support of Mr Prentis from full time officers and instead: "They got them from the regional convener is all

.you need to tell them, they got them from the regional convener or the regional convener team is perfectly fine" she said. It would have been a lie as the Greater London Regional staff are not regional conveners

154. No matter how many times one re-reads the transcript, the shock does not diminish. It is flagrant: Ms Perks' tone is not just confident and swaggering in so openly breaking the rules, but chilling in its brazenness and demonstration of unchecked power.

Linda Perks was suspended as it was an obvious and deliberate breach of the union’s election rules. It is difficult to think of a case that was more deserving of summary dismissal than this one. Perks was found however given a final warning. As Ms Stacey found:

213. On the conclusion of the internal disciplinary process she was given a final written warning and received a disciplinary transfer away from the Greater London Region. At the time of the hearing the Applicants had assumed that having been compulsorily moved away from the Greater London Region she would now be based in another part of the country. It emerged during the hearing that she had moved to the Union's newly refurbished head office approximately 1/2 mile from the London Regional Office retaining her grade and status. There was no evidence as to her job title or job description at the hearing. After the hearing both sides supplied further information. Normally evidence submitted after the hearing would not be admitted, but since all sides seemed keen for the ACO to have a complete picture and the evidence is not disputed, I record that Ms Perks now has the title of National Secretary and is engaged on "strategic projects."

In other words the disciplinary process was carried out with a nod and a wink. What obviously happened was that Linda Perks agreed to a disciplinary process whereby it was guaranteed that she would not be dismissed and nor would she suffer any financial or other penalty. She was moved out of the Greater London Region, half the mile down the road. This is the contempt union rules are held in when those who make them break them.

Initially the Union’s officials and Prentis even denied that the tape recording of the meeting was genuine. They alleged it had been ‘tampered with’.As the Mary Stacey found:

218. On the same day (11.1.16.) the Union's President and Vice President issued an email with a wide distribution to the NEC....

"Dear Colleague,

As you know a number of serious allegations have been made against our union in London. The complaints are being investigated.

Whilst it is not our practice to comment on an ongoing investigation on this occasion we believe there is one aspect that warrants public disclosure. This can be done without compromising the rights of those involved in this matter. The complaint presented by Jon Rogers relies heavily on an anonymous recording. Given the seriousness of this tape the union commissioned independent forensic expert report of the full recording. The Presidential team and the Trustees of the union now have the full report from the Audio Forensic Service.

The forensic analysis was undertaken by an accredited audio specialist and the company is used by the High Court for audio evidence. The report clearly states that "the probability of tampering is exceptionally high". On a scale of 1(low) to 5 (high), the Independent Expert rates the tape as 5/5.

219. This is quite an extraordinary email, especially given that UNISON accept the legitimacy of the tape. In his evidence Mr McKenzie said he did not know about the forensic analysis. If it indeed exists" it was not passed to the Investigating Officer, contrary to the assertion in the email. It begs so many questions: Does this report exist? If so, where is it? Why wasn't it given to'Mr McKenzie if it so conclusively demonstrated that the tape was some kind of fake? Why didn't Mr McKenzie mention it in his report or ask to see it when he must have known about it and received the President's email? Why send the email? Mr McKenzie was clear in his evidence that he had always found the tape persuasive and the Union has conceded its accuracy and authenticity.

220. The President's email is thus a classic example of an attempt by the victors to write the history (regardless of accuracy) and denigrate those whom they see as their vanquished adversaries.

Unfortunately Ms Stacey went on to find that because there was no proof that similar behaviour had occurred outside London, the result should stand. This was an amazing position to take.  If there has been a flagrant breach of election rules in one part of the country then that should have resulted in an inexorable inference that the whole election was corrupt. It is certain that Prentis had other union officials doing the same around the country. The fact that no other tape recordings surfaced is immaterial. As Stacey found:

226. ... there was no specific evidence to find that abuses such as occurred in the Greater London Region were occurring in other parts of the country. Witnesses and evidence has not been presented to me to make such primary findings.

Stacey’s finding over the ‘penalty’ that Perks suffered is damning and shows the utter cynicism of UNISON’s officials when those breaching the rules happen to be those in control of the union.

257. ...the disciplinary sanction applied to the Greater London Regional Secretary for her actions ... is revealing. She has remained an employee at the same pay, seniority and level, moving to an office approximately half a mile from her previous office. Although she has received a final written warning, ... she remains a very senior employee enjoying all the fruits of high office and long service based in the Union's prestigious Head Office working on undefined "strategic" projects. Remarkable clemency and lenience in the circumstances and perhaps not a deterrent penalty to decourager les autres.

295. The subsequent leisurely disciplinary proceedings of Ms Perks and outcome do not inspire confidence or serve as a deterrent to future over zealous paid officials. Some might think the move to National Secretary in Head Office on unspecified strategic projects retaining all pay and benefits represents reward rather than punishment, although she has also endured the imposition of a final written warning

There is a good account of what happened in respect of Perks in the 853 Blog which serves Greenwich and the surrounding area. Greenwich Labour candidate selected despite being condemned by judge. In September Perks retired from her position in UNISON. At her retirement function Dave Prentis spoke about the debt that he felt to her: “Absolutely packed house to thank Linda Perks, one of our longest serving regional secretaries. We will all miss her” For once Prentis was telling the truth.  He will certainly miss his faithful Perks.

For previous posts on this case see:

What is UNISON for if it doesn't defend its own members? Stan Keable - abandoned by Steve Terry, the union’s London Regional Officer

Stan Keable - Suspended for Expressing his Opinion on Zionism - Welcome to Stephen Cowan's Thought Police in Hammersmith & Fulham Council

Letter of Suspension

Unison’s Shameful Betrayal of its members – it supports the right to dismiss a worker for attending a demonstration

SAVE WHITEHAWK HILL LOCAL NATURE RESERVE

November 5, 2018, 4:43 pm

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Brighton Council & Hyde Housing Association Plan the Destruction of local nature reserve in working class Whitehawk

This is a guest post by David Bangs, a local environmental campaigner and member of the Labour Party.

WHITEHAWK HILL

PROPOSED HIGH RISE HOUSING DEVELOPMENT

BUTCHERING BRIGHTON'S SENIOR PUBLIC SPACE

A site for a major housing project has been proposed at Whitehawk Hill, as a result of the grossly flawed Brighton and Hove Urban Fringe Assessment Survey of 2014. The new Living Wage Joint Venture Board (LWJVB), set up 50:50 between Hyde Housing and BHCC, has targeted this site for 217 homes in six tower blocks of equal height to the highest adjacent existing blocks.

OK to chop Whitehawk Hill in two ?

Whitehawk Hill is Brighton's senior public open space and most important Downland landscape. The proposal to build a major high rise housing development at its heart is monstrous.

 It will hack this landscape in two, destroying its integrity.

Would it be OK to chop PrestonPark or HoveParkin two ?

If it was suggested that PrestonParkor HovePark be chopped in two it'd be a no-brainer that the scheme was daft.

Because Whitehawk Hill  is next to Brighton's most deprived community it is thought safe to propose its dismemberment, despite the Hill being richer in many public values than those two public parks...in wildlife, deep history and prehistory, for free play in nature, for landscape, Downland views, food growing, foraging, horse racing, dog walking, badger watching...

 

'Fish and chip Downland' and 'cream tea Downland'

Whitehawk Hill is 'fish and chip Downland', not 'cream tea Downland'. That is why it is attacked.

The trashing of Whitehawk Hill is an 'equalities issue', though no mention of this is made by the Council.

2002: Good enough to be in the National Park !

2018: Only good for a high rise housing development ?

In February 2002 the full Council voted for the inclusion of the whole of Whitehawk Hill in the proposed National Park. Though a small group of councillors later got this undemocratically overturned in the P&R Committee they accepted the inclusion of the proposed housing site and the wider hill slope in the National Park.

How come this landscape was good enough for all Parties to agree it should be in the National Park in 2002, and in 2018 it's okay to site a major housing development there?

 

Recreational common / statutory Local Nature Reserve / statutory Access Land / Scheduled Ancient Monument

Whitehawk Hill's multiple public values are reflected in a wealth of designations.

In 1822 the 106 acre 'Race Ground' (a recreational common) was created by deed at the enclosure of Brighton's commons. The deed stated it was for "the inhabitants of Brightonand the public in general", for "racing, exercise and diversion". The new common was not be to "broken up, cultivated, or divided."

In 1923 the 12 acre Whitehawk Camp Neolithic causewayed enclosure was designated a ScheduledAncientMonument. (SAM) - one of the ten best such sites in the country.

In 1997 the whole Hill was declared a statutory Local Nature Reserve (LNR).

In 2002 the City Council voted to support its inclusion in the proposed National Park.

In 2003 it was declared to be statutory AccessLand under the 'CROW' Act (Countryside and Rights of Way Act).

Wildlife as good as Castle Hill National Nature Reserve

The ancient Gorse thicket on the proposed housing site is home to rare and special scrubland birds. It is a well known site for Dartford Warblers, Stonechat and Whitethroat, with numbers fluctuating over time, and with hard or mild winters. For many years local residents have watched Badgers play. Rare insects like the Large Velvet Ant (actually a primitive kind of 'cuckoo' wasp) are present. It is home to the giant Great Green Bush Cricket.

The wildlife community of Whitehawk Hill is at least 5000 years old and probably much older. Its wildlife is comparable with that of the Castle Hill NNR, with Adonis and Chalkhill Blue butterflies, rare wildflowers and pasture fungi (the best assemblage in the city).

Horribly neglected, punch-drunk, but still standing...Will our Council now deliver the knock-out blow to our ancient Hill ?

Whitehawk Hill is horribly neglected and its users sold short by our Council. In recent years it has suffered piecemeal development. -more Racecourse infrastructure, WyevaleGarden Centre, and more - and the neglect of many of the management tasks in the LNR Management Plan (notwithstanding the HEROIC work of the Countryside Service ranger and volunteers). But its wildlife and archaeology still survive.

We should be re-unifying The Racecourse Landscape (Whitehawk Hill / SheepcoteValley / Red Hill) not breaking it in two.

If this goes through, more will follow

If this proposal goes through it will set a precedent in Brighton and other local councils, for breaking up their core wildlife sites when pressed to find land for housing and other developments.

This is a city-wide, regional and national issue, not just a local one.

The proposals, at the crowded northern end of a crowded suburb, will, if built, drive huge further pressure for a direct road link with the adjacent road system (Elm Grove, Warren Road, Freshfield Road etc).

Pressures to further encroach on the broken fragments of remaining high value landscape will grow steeply.

The need for housing

We passionately support the case for a major drive to build, buy, and purchase back more council homes in our City.

We see whole areas of low density, high cost, under-occupied housing, with privileged levels of private garden space, at the heart, and at the edge of our city, which could do far more to accommodate council homes.

We see major housing schemes go ahead in which the driver is more private sector high cost homes, not homes for the low waged and no waged.

We see major housing schemes go ahead in which the needs of temporarily resident students are privileged over those of our poorer residents, the homeless and poorly housed.

We urge the council to re-focus on driving forward more sites for council homes, if necessary at the expense of high cost housing, student accommodation, and some employment and retail  uses, but NOT at the expense of nature or our cherished public open spaces.

Whitehawk Hill is as important to Brighton as the Royal Pavilion

RESPECT ITS INTEGRITY   CHERISH IT   RESTORE IT

Actions

Write/email your local Brighton & HoveCity councillor. (The Council website will give you those details).

Write to/email members of the Housing, Planning, and Environment Committees of Brighton and Hove City Council

Write to/email Hyde Housing. (Go to )

Write to/email the BHCC Board members of the LWJVB (Living Wage Joint Venture Board) which governs the Whitehawk Hill building project. They are Cllr Anne Meadows, Cllr Mary  Mears, & Cllr David Gibson

SOME NOTES

Dave Bangs T: 01273 620 815;  October 2018SOME NOTES

Dave Bangs T: 01273 620 815;  October 2018

KAPO - the Anti-Semitic Insult that Zionists and their anti-Semitic friends use when attacking anti-Zionists

November 5, 2018, 7:34 pm

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Eli Valley’s Cartoon Highlights How Today’s Christian Fascists, neo-Nazis and Zionists have no sense of irony

The insult ‘kapo’ was first popularisedby Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman. In fact he used it, not against Jewish anti-Zionists but against the liberal American Zionist group, J-Street.

Yesterday I was sent a brilliant cartoon from Jewish Currents, a paper of the American Jewish left in which he satirises those who shout ‘kapo’ whilst separating children from their parents in Trump’s concentration camps on the border.  Referring to those Jews who serve Trump faithfully, like arch-Zionist Sheldon Adelson and Stephen Miller, he observed that “kapo” doesn’t begin to plumb the depths of their betrayal.’

Zionists, like most racists, don’t do irony because if they did they would suffer the self-destruction of their own identity as they began to appreciate that if anyone approximates to collaborators, which is the essence of the charge, it is they.

I don’t mean by that just the trade agreement between Nazi Germany and the Zionist movement in 1933, Ha'avara, which broke the International Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany.

Nor do I mean the betrayal of half a million Hungarian Jews in 1944 by  the representative of Hungarian Zionism Rudolph Kasztner, whereby the Auschwitz Protocols, which revealed the existence and purpose of Auschwitz, were deliberately suppressed in order to preserve an agreement between the Zionist leaders and Eichmann.

After all Zionist collaboration with anti-Semitism was explained by the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl when, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair he confided to his Diaries that:

In Paris... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism.

The memorial to the murdered Jews of Pittsburgh

Zionism ‘pardoned’ anti-Semitism because it agreed that Jews don’t belong in non-Jewish society.  Zionism believes that Jews, all Jews, should emigrate to Israel, their ‘real home’. In the wake of the Pittsburgh massacre, Avi Gabbay, leader of the Israeli Labour Party toldthe Jews of America that their place was in Israel, which is what their murderer Robert Burstow also believed.

Back in 1933, as Jews prepared to campaign against the newly installed Nazi government Berl Katznelson, Ben Gurion’s deputy, founder of Mapai and editor of Davar, saw the rise of Hitler as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”. [Zionism and Nazi Germany, Francis Nicosia, p.91]

Zionism opposed ‘refugeeism’ the saving of Jews for its own sake. Their ‘logic’ was that there was no point in Jews going to any country other than Palestine because that would merely stimulate fresh anti-Semitism. Hence why Ben Gurion and the Jewish Agency opposed the Kindertransport which saved 10,000 Jewish children in the wake of Kristalnacht:  Ben Gurion told Mapai that

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel. [Shabtai Teveth, the Burning Ground, p.855]

I mentioned irony.  What could be more ironic than those who belong to a movement that collaborated with Nazis and anti-Semites calling their opponents collaborators?

The kapos were themselves prisoners who were destined for extermination. They had no control over their situation and their collaboration, if that is what it was, was forced. Who knows what any of us would do in such a situation? The Jewish Agency was under no such compulsion yet it willingly collaborated lobbying the Gestapo not to allow Jewish emigration to countries other than Palestine.

Being called a kapo by Zionists reminds me of Britain First holding a demonstrationoutside Didsbury mosque and chanting ‘racist scum off our streets.’ Today we have the spectacle of racists calling their opponents collaborators with racism. Of course it makes no sense when the racists portray themselves as anti-racists however the National Front and BNP used to try and portray themselves as defending Whites against Black racism.

One of the ironies of the Zionist use of 'kapos' is that it is a frequent occurrence for Zionists to desire that their Jewish opponents had perished in the Holocaust. Aurora Levins Morales, a Black Jewish woman in New York, speaks of 'The Jews who write to tell me that I should have died in a Nazi concentration camp before living to denounce the crimes of Israel.' [On Anti-semitism, JVP, p.107, Haymarket Books, 2017]

James Dyer's Christian forefathers 80 years ago would have been opposing the entry of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany

I mention this because a particularly vile Christian Zionist, James Dyer, who is part of the EDL loving Sussex Friends of Israel, which is attempting to disrupt Brighton PSC stall, accused me of being a kap. My retort was that if I was a kapo be must be a Nazi! I suspect he didn’t understand why.

Dyer is part of the fundamentalist Christian support for Zionism which is based on the ‘End Times’, which is the belief that Christians will be summoned to Heaven by Christ at the Rapture. This occurs before a "Great Tribulation" prophesied in Matthew 24–25; Mark 13 and Luke 21. The Tribulation is described in the book of Revelation.  

As part of this scenario those Jews who don’t convert to Christianity will be die at the battle of Armageddon as part of the second coming. The most famous advocate of this is President of Christians United for Israel, John Hagee, who also believesthat Hitler was an agent of God sent to drive the Jews to Israel! This led John McCain when standing against Obama to turn down Hagee’s sponsorship. Hagee was nonetheless one of two  Protestant Pastors invitedto preside over the  opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem.  Who better to have than someone who believes that Hitler did god’s work.

The Biblical 'return' of the Jews to Palestine justifies any and all human rights abuses

Indeed they were more than ironic given the history of Christian anti-Semitism. In Germany itself the German Evangelical Church installed in 1933 the pro-Nazi Bishop Ludwig Muller as Reich Bishop. In Slovakia it was the Catholic priest Father Tiso who presided over the first deportations to Auschwitz.

It is therefore no surprise that today the successors of Muller and Tiso are to be found supporting the Zionists and decrying any notion of Palestinian rights. It is even less of a surprise that they assuage their consciences with the taunt of ‘Kapo’.

George Soros - a unifying figure for Trump, the Zionists and the antisemites of the Alt-Right

November 7, 2018, 4:07 pm

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Soros the ‘Puppet Master’ is at the heart of the anti-Semitism which Zionism Koshers

When the Tory tabloids ran a series of anti-semitic headlines attacking George Soros, including the Nazi term Puppet Master the Zionist 'opponents' of antisemitism like the misnamed Campaign Against Antisemitism remained silent

One of the central features of anti-Semitic ideology is the all-powerful global Jewish financier. In previous times the Rothschild family fulfilled this role, today it is George Soros. The Jewish World Conspiracy Theory, whereby Jews control both capitalism and communism is personified in such a person. Jewish capitalists were supposed to have funded the Bolshevik revolution and Hitler’s anti-Semitism stemmed from his belief that Communism was a Jewish creation. [Jewish Bolshevism]

It needs to be said that Soros, who was one of those who funded a range of anti-Communist groups in the former Soviet Block is no revolutionary. But his funding of liberal and civil society groups, including human rights organisations and his opposition to Brexit has aroused the ire of a broad swathe of the Right, including the neo-Nazi and overtly anti-Semitic Right.  The image of Soros that the anti-Semites portray is a fiction, it is the traditional anti-semitic image of the manipulative Jewish financier.  It bears no resemblance to Soros just as anti-semitic imagery also bears no relation to Jews. But the fact that Soros is a billionaire speculator is no justification for anti-semitic attacks on him.

Battle of Waterloo

In 1940 the Nazis produced a film Die Rothschilds Aktien auf Waterloo about Nathan Rothschild and how he made his fortune out of the bloodshed of Waterloo. It was based on a pamphlet which took the Europe of 1846 by storm. It still resonatesto this day.

There are even some fools in the Palestine solidarity movement who trace the existence of Israel to ‘the Rothschilds’. In fact the actual relationship between this family and the Zionist movement was a very mixed one. At the outset ‘Herzl appealed in vain to wealthy Jews such as Baron Hirsch and Baron Rothschild, to join the national Zionist movement.’ Lionel Nathan de Rothschild foundedthe anti-Zionist League of British Jews in 1917.

The Rothschilds have been replaced by the figure of George Soros, who was a child survivor of the Hungarian Holocaust. Soros has become the unifying figure for the anti-Semitic and Zionist Right.

Glenn Beck outlining the tentacles of George Soros, the great financial manipulator

According to Glenn Beck Soros was “the puppetmaster” – a Jewish financier with ties to no nation, intent on creating a “one world government” and subverting the United States. It is an anti-Semitic phrase that the Sun also used on a headline when attacking Soros over Brexit before quickly withdrawing it.

Beck describedhow “Eighty years ago George Soros was born, little did people know that economies would collapse, currencies would become worthless, elections would be stolen.” Gideon Rachman describes how ‘The nastiest moment (amongst much competition) comes when Beck tries to claim that the 14-year-old Soros came from an anti-semitic family and himself participated in the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust.’

In April Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party won a two-thirds majority in a campaign against the absent Soros. Orbán ran his campaign on the single issue of migration. Orban accused Soros of a ‘plot... to send millions of migrants to Hungary.’

All of Orban’s anti-Semitic venom was encapsulated in his speech of 15^th March commemorating the 170^thanniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. It is, to be sure, a classic summation of the caricature of the Jew as a rootless cosmopolitan, owing loyalty to nothing but his own purse.

“We must fight against an opponent which is different from us. Their faces are not visible, but are hidden from view; they do not fight directly, but by stealth; they are not honourable, but unprincipled; they are not national, but international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs. They are not generous, but vengeful, and always attack the heart—especially if it is red, white and green.”

Evolve politics, which describes itself as ‘truly independent’ thus making me immediately suspicious, describeshow the Tories have appointed one Roger Scruton, on the far-Right of British politics to chair an architecture quango.  Scruton was Editor of the Salisbury Review, a Tory magazine which believed Margaret Thatcher was a dangerous radical, for 18 years. 

Luciana Berger, Labour Zionist MP, takes objection to the appointment of Roger Scruton whilst turning a blind eye to Israel's love affair with Orban

More hypocrisy from an MP who is a last ditch defender of Israel's racist policies

In an example of the hypocrisy that passes for Zionist politics Luciana Berger, the Labour Zionist MP who fronts the Jewish Labour Movement and spends most of her time attacking Jeremy Corbyn for ‘anti-Semitism’ had the audacity to say that ‘An individual who peddles antisemitic conspiracy theories has no place advising government about anything.’ Quite why this should be so when Sir Eric Pickles was until recently in the Cabinet is difficulty to understand.  Naturally opportunist rent a mouth MP Wes Streeting joined in. Both of them were aghast because Scruton was a supporter of Viktor Orban.  Why the surprise?

Tory MEPs have just voted to defendOrban in the European parliament. The same Tory MEPs sitin the European Conservative Reform group with at least 3 anti-Semitic parties with barely a murmur from the Zionists.

Orban's 'outstanding statesman' with friend - Zionist labour can't criticise the Tories support for Orban without asking why Orban was a guest of honour in Israel last July

I have repeatedly written that Orban has called Admiral Horthy, the pro-Nazi ruler of Hungary who presided over the deportation to Auschwitz of nearly half a million Jews an “exceptional statesmen”.  None of this prevented Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu visiting Orban on a state visit in the summer of 2017.

Add caption

I also described how ‘Orban dedicated a nasty and vicious poster campaign to attacking Soros last year, replete with all the anti-Semitic dog whistles that only he was capable of.  Hungary’s Jewish community was up in arms.’  Why are anti-Semitic regimes so attractive to Israel and the Zionist movement?

Anti-semitic Republican cartoon attacking Democrate candidate - with fistful of dollars in her hand - the dogs are whistling

Reuters reportedlast year that ‘Israel’s ambassador to Hungary issued a statement denouncing the campaign, saying it “evokes sad memories but also sows hatred and fear”, an apparent reference to Hungary’s part in the deportation of half a million Jews during the Holocaust.But here’s the strange thing. Netanyahu ‘hit the roof. He wasn’t going to have his closest ally in Europe attacked because of a little local anti-Semitism.’

Hours after the Ambassador made his comments, a spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry, issued a “clarification” saying that Soros was a legitimate target for criticism. Surprise, surprise!

In 2017 Orban launched a poster campaign against George Soros in Budapest as part of his campaign to close Soros's European University - when the Israeli Ambassador uttered a few mild criticisms he was forced to retract by Netanyahu

“In no way was the statement (by the ambassador) meant to delegitimize criticism of George Soros, who continuously undermines Israel’s democratically elected governments,” said foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon, adding that Soros funded organizations “that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself”. Israel backs Hungary, says financier Soros is a threat

As Evolve observes

‘Orban even went as far as commissioning a deeply antisemitic advertising campaign that plastered Soros’ grinning face on billboards with the caption “Don’t let George Soros have the last laugh.“

What Netanyahu is saying is that Soros helps fund Israeli human rights groups like B’tselem and in Netanyahu’s eyes this counts as ‘undermining’ his police state regime. All of this took place without a murmur from Luciana.  Because of course she had bigger fish to fry namely Corbyn and it wouldn’t do to criticise her favourite state (Israel in case you wondered) as anti-Semitic.

Yair Netanyahu's anti-semitic cartoon of Soros attracted rare praise for a Jew from the Daily Stormer - possibly a first

Daily Stormer

None of this is surprising, because to Netanyahu Soros is the anti-Christ (we don’t have an anti-Moses!). Netanyahu’s son, Yair, helpfully posted a nice anti-Semitic cartoon of Soros at the centre of a conspiracy, complete with Lizard to undermine the Israeli state.  Praise came from neo-Nazi former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke no less.  Indeed Andrew Anglin, editor of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer joined in the congratulations, which is no mean feat since he has sworn never to talk to or meet a Jew.

David Duke, neo-Nazi ex-KKK gives his approval to antisemitic cartoon by Netanyahu's son Yair

Not it should be thought that Orban is the only anti-Semite that Netanyahu has close and friendly relations with.  Poland’s Law and Justice Party is just as close which is why when Poland passed a law making criticism of Polish collaboration with the Nazis a criminal offence, Netanyahu moved quickly to head off criticism by concocting a deal with them that left the legislation in place. The Real Reason Netanyahu Gave Cover To Holocaust Deniers

Holocaust survivors and anti-racist Israelis picket Yad Vashem during Orban's visit

Naturally, having been invitedto visit Hungary on a state visit Netanyahu returned the favour and last July Orban found time to visit his best friend.  As is normal on these occasions Orban paid homage at the Holocaust propaganda museum that Israel maintains, Yad Vashem. We therefore had the ludicrous situation of someone who thinks Horthy, who sent nearly half a million Jews to their deaths, is an ‘exceptional statesman’ paying homage to the 6 million.  Pass the sick bag Alice, as Private Eye used to say.

However none of the claque of Zionist Labour MPs had anything to say about this.  It was left to some of Israel’s Holocaust survivors to picket Orban when he paid homage at Yad Vashem. The Times of Israel’s report of the demonstration Livid protesters block Hungarian PM Orban as he leaves Yad Vashem quoted Yad Vashem as saying that ‘its hosting of Orban was determined by Foreign Ministry directives, which require foreign leaders and other visiting dignitaries to visit the memorial.’  If Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, which has always produced a Zionised version of Holocaust history, erasing for years the name even of the Auschwitz escapees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler (because they were not Zionists) cannot even refuse entrance to a known anti-Semite because it has to follow government instructions then there is no other way to describe it other than a propaganda institution.

Below is an excellent article in Jewish Currents, a left-wing American Jewish publication on what it calls The Soros Myth.

Tony Greenstein

The Soros Myth - Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Undermining and Delegitimizing of Protest

Racism, Antisemitism, ideas of “outside agitators” are the right’s most effective tools for delegitimizing the message and messengers of social justice. If protest can be blamed on those outside, both the message and the messenger are untrustworthy.

October 11, 2018 Dove Kent; Jewish Currents (Portside)

Protestors opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, September 2018., Photo: Mobilus In Mobili via Flickr // Jewish Currents

For decades, the right has undermined Black protest and resistance movements as “violent,” “dangerous,” and “un-American” and has responded with militarized force. Under this administration, Trump and his allies are replicating and amplifying this strategy, using misogyny and antisemitism to further erode the basic foundations of political participation.

In response to weeks of women and trans protests demanding that Judge Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual assault, be removed from consideration for the Supreme Court, Donald Trump tweeted out:

The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad. Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love! #Troublemakers

This was quickly followed by a retweeted antisemitic message from Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and a longtime Republican leader, calling Soros the enemy of Christ:

Follow the money. I think Soros is the anti-Christ! He must go! Freeze his assets & I bet the protests stop.

Trump and his allies’ deployment of misogyny and antisemitism in this moment are attempts to  undermine our movements, echoing ways the right wing has long attacked protest movements on the left. The power of protest lies in its credibility as the voice of public opinion. If women and trans protestors can be dismissed as pawns or operatives rather than agents of social change, then the power of protest is weakened. If a single Jew can be blamed for orchestrating the whole affair, then the power of protest is further eroded.

Birds of a feather and all that

This antisemitic rhetoric from the state echoes among white nationalists. In the days following Trump’s tweet and Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, fliers (created by the Daily Stormer) appeared on college campuses and in cities in California and New York. The fliers blamed Jews for orchestrating the assault allegations brought against Judge Kavanaugh. They read: “Every time some anti-white, anti-American, anti-freedom event takes place, you look at it, and it’s Jews behind it.” The Northern Virginia Jewish Community Center (the community center I grew up in) was vandalized with dozens of swastikas.

Trump’s white nationalist audience knows what he means when he points the finger at Soros—he’s invoking a time-tested antisemitic strategy for undermining social movements. According to Jews for Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ) Board Member Dania Rajendra:

Antisemitism and the idea of “outside agitators” is the right’s most effective tool for delegitimizing both the message and messengers of social justice. If protest can be blamed on those outside of the state, then both the message and the messenger are untrustworthy. Delegitimizing both is necessary to eventually repress or expel said “troublemakers” by the forces of “law and order.” And in fact, we saw the president say exactly that to a conference of police the same week as his post-Kavanaugh-protest Soros tweet.

We know that we need a strong, vibrant, awake electorate holding elected officials accountable. Undermining the credibility of protest is an extremely effective tool of protecting those in power.

Right-wing regimes have long broken down the fabric of political protest by using the antisemitic notion of rich Jewish financiers as the “puppet masters” of social unrest. During the Russian Revolution, the Tsar’s secret police published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictional account of a meeting of rich Jews plotting to break down the society of their “host countries” and rule the world through the promotion of social upheaval. For a period, the Protocols did its job to undermine and destabilize the revolution against the Tsar. Because of its success, it’s been translated and promoted by right-wing ideologues around the world ever since.

The Protocols gave us dog whistle terms like “globalist,” a slur associated with Jews that paint them as untrustworthy, ready to betray the nations of their residence in service of an unseen authority. The general idea, from JFREJ’s resource Understanding Antisemitism: An Offering to our Movement, is that “Jews are a powerful, corrupting influence on otherwise good, pure people—insidious troublemakers with a nefarious agenda at odds with that of the good, ‘true’ citizens of a nation.”

During McCarthyism, these well known stereotypes about Jews were used to tar communists and leftist movement activists (Jewish and non-Jewish) as untrustworthy, two-faced “troublemakers” with foreign loyalties detrimental to the United States. The over-representation of Jews and non-Jewish people of color (always seen as suspect by the white owning class) in leftist movement circles made these claims plausible. Through institutional state repression and violence—blacklisting, closures of organizations, and ultimately the public execution of the Rosenbergs—the Red Scare successfully decimated the social fabric of leftist movements.

It is deeply troubling to see these same tropes, indeed some of the very same language, being used against today’s social movements by the president and leaders of the Republican party. Trump and other Republicans have regularly claimed that George Soros (the central target of this anti-Semitic messaging) is entirely behind the Movement for Black Lives. Here racism and antisemitism intersect: rather than admit that a strong, powerful Black liberation movement is growing throughout the US, some white people would believe that it is one or a few rich Jews propping up Black people to cause unrest in the streets and undermine white Christian society.

It's not just antisemitism on its own, but antisemitism deployed against the left that gives the lie about Soros its cultural power. Our side can point out that right-wing efforts are funded by the Koch, Walton and Mercer families all day long, but that fact and its broadcast never delegitimizes their endeavors. That's because the Soros lie—the invocation of the idea of the scary, untrustworthy Jew—is built on top of a bunch of other assumptions: that "real" Americans are Christian and white, and hew to patriarchal gender norms and racial segregation.

Luckily, we know how to fight back. We can recognize the ways in which racism, antisemitism, and misogyny are deployed to keep our movements weak and divided and we can refuse to fall for conspiracy theories. We can join together in the raw, tough, honest work of building multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-class, multi-faith movements. We can center the leadership of those most impacted. We can collectively disinvest from whiteness and practice multi-racial democracy in everything we do.

In the face of the destructive attacks of the extreme right wing, we have an opportunity to respond with a solidarity that buttresses and expands democracy—a rebuttal to an oppressive past and a promise for a liberated future.

[Dove Kent is an organizer, educator, and movement builder based in Durham, North Carolina. She is the former Executive Director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice.]

Trump and McConnell Take Gaslighting to New Level in Kavanaugh Confirmation Fight

The use of an anti-Semitic trope to condemn protesters for exercising their First Amendment rights signals a turning point in the authoritarian trajectory of our politics.

By Adele M. Stan

October 5, 2018
The American Prospect

President Trump arrives for a campaign rally in Rochester, Minnesota, on October 4, 2018. credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci  //  The American Prospect

The confirmation process for President Donald J. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, continues to be a significant test of the U.S. form of government, and a display of high drama.

Washington, D.C., was only on its third cup of coffee when the presidential tweethit: “The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad,” wrote Trump. “Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love! #Troublemakers.”

He was speaking, of course, of the sexual assault survivors—mostly women—who have been following the example set by Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher when they famously confronted Republican Senator Jeff Flake by holding his elevator door open and imploring him to consider the experiences of those who have been targets of sexual assault when deciding whether to vote for moving the nomination to the Senate floor.

Before long, speaking from the Senate floor, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—who had recently promised the religious right that he and his caucus planned to “plow right through” the confirmation—complained of the “harm” he said was done to Kavanaugh and his family because of allegations of sexual assault made against him by Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor from California. Then McConnell cast the thousands of protesters who have come to the U.S. Capitol buildings in opposition to the nomination as “the mob.”

In both instances, these national leaders branded people exercising their First Amendment rights as dangerous.

In both instances, these national leaders branded people exercising their First Amendment rights as dangerous.McConnell complained of security threats to senators. And Trump trotted out the right’s favorite code word for its ideology of anti-Semitism. That word is “Soros.”

In both the fever swamps of the American right, and the forests of Europe’s right-wing nationalist movements, the hedge fund billionaire George Soros—a Jewish Holocaust survivor born in Hungary—has become a favorite bogeyman because of his support of liberal and civil-society groups. In Europe, he is cast as a destroyer of Europe’s Christian values. (His Open Society Foundation was pushed out of Hungary, which also recently passed anti-immigration legislation dubbed the “Stop Soros” law.) He’s also a favorite target of the U.S. right, where invocation of his name carries the same sort of anti-Semitic code. Here, he’s reviled for donating to progressive and liberal groups, and has consequently become fodder for the conspiracy theorists of the right.

One racist congratulating another

Characterizations of Soros by right-wing figures follow the outline of old anti-Semitic tropes such as the fabricated “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and conspiracies supposedly involving the Rothschild family.

This is the strategy of authoritarians. Create fear that chaos created by backlash to the authoritarian’s exercise of raw power is really taking place at the direction of one very powerful enemy. Discourage people from public protest by painting the opposition as “evil,” as Trump did in the Mississippi rally he led this week, where he mocked Ford for her inability to remember every single little detail of the 1982 evening on which she says she was assaulted by Kavanaugh.

“These are really evil people,” Trump said of Ford and the Democrats who insisted on her right to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose job it is to vet nominees to the federal bench. Note that among the right-wing evangelicals who comprise much of Trump’s base, “evil” is regarded as an existential spiritual threat, the stuff of Satan.

As I write this, the outcome of the final vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination to sit on the highest court in the land is not certain. But the clampdown is coming—a clampdown on dissent, a clampdown on access to the levers of congressional process by the president’s opponents.

As I write this, the outcome of the final vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination to sit on the highest court in the land is not certain. But the clampdown is coming—a clampdown on dissent, a clampdown on access to the levers of congressional process by the president’s opponents. As McConnell promised, he really has “plow[ed] right through” this nomination process, complete with a final FBI report on the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh that, through circumscription of inquiry imposed by the White House, amounted to a whitewash.

The exercise of authoritarian power is not anything that Trump, McConnell, and their allies even attempt to conceal at this point. It’s happening in front of your face. Pay attention. Take note of the signs. But don’t let it keep you from the streets, or from the voting booth.

The republic as we have known it could cease to exist if we allow it. And that time is growing closer. They’re playing for all the marbles. They mustn’t be allowed to win.

[Adele M. Stan is a columnist for The American Prospect. She is research director of People for the American Way, and a winner of the Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism.]